THE 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 

IN  MEMORY  OF 
MRS.  VIRGINIA  B.  SPORER 


c 


WOMAN   AND  TO-MORROW 


WOMAN 

AND  TO-MORROW 


BY 

W.   L.   GEORGE 


NEW  YORK 

D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 
MCMXIII 


CONTENTS 


I.  GENERAL  I 

II.  FEMINISM  AND  SUFFRAGISM  -          2J 

III.  THE  HOME               -                  -  57 

IV.  THE  ARTS                                    -  -          95 
V.  WOMAN  AND  LABOUR          -  -  ^125 

VI.  WOMAN  AND  PASSION          -  "       1 57 


204211 


I 

GENERAL 


WOMAN    AND  TO-MORROW 

I 
GENERAL 

FEMINISM  is  often  confounded  with 
Suffragism.  This  is  damaging  and 
inaccurate.  It  is  therefore  necessary 
to  define  Feminism,  and  this  may  appear 
tiresome  in  essays  which  do  not  pretend  to 
be  more  than  indications,  milestones  on  the 
road  to  understanding.  But  the  Feminist 
idea,  like  most  modern  ideas,  is  suggestive 
rather  than  didactic.  It  has  not  yet 
crystallised  into  a  final  form,  and  therein 
lie  its  strength  and  its  hope ;  it  has  no 
rules,  few  text-books,  no  traditions,  no 
shibboleths,  and  its  adherents  wage  against 
one  another  a  fierce,  if  beneficial  war.  It 
is  like  an  infant  whose  skull-bones  are  not 
yet  set,  under  whose  young  skin  the  fresh, 
generous  blood  can  be  seen  as  it  flows.  It  has 
not  attained  the  obstinacies  of  the  adult,  felt 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

the  trammels  of  its  own  conventions ;  when 
it  is  not  dumb  it  is  hysterical.  The  Feminist 
principle  is  bursting  with  its  own  vitality. 
And  it  is  hot,  uneasy,  controversial ;  it  is 
prompt  to  adopt,  prompt  to  reject  and 
expel ;  it  readily  cries  out  upon  the  doubter: 
"  We  are  betrayed ! "  it  splits  upon  every 
obstacle  into  schismatic  movements,  as  lava 
upon  a  rock.  You  must  take  Feminism  as 
the  Feminist  preaches  it — or  find  another 
Feminist :  there  is  no  compromise. 

This  is  the  story  of  every  progressive 
movement.  Already  Liberalism  has  divided 
into  several  streams,  Imperialist,  Orthodox, 
and  Radical,  which  flow  resentfully  in  a 
single  channel,  while  Labour,  Fabian 
Socialism,  Independent  Labour,  Social 
Democracy,  and  Syndicalism  watch  one 
another  in  a  hostile  spirit.  With  progress 
comes  schism.  Conservatism  even,  in  an 
attempt  to  be  "  progressive,"  that  is  to  say 
constructive,  has  produced  the  •'  Con- 
federates" and  the  rebellious  young  section 
which  reluctantly  obeys  the  old  leaders. 
Feminism,  in  so  far  as  it  is  concerned 
with  ideas,  is  undergoing  the  same  pressure : 


GENERAL 


while  the  process  by  which  it  "  finds 
itself "  is  at  first  weakening,  it  must  in 
the  end  strengthen  the  movement  by  re- 
fining it,  excluding  the  dishonest  and  the 
incompetent,  by  concentrating  power  in  the 
hands  of  the  minority.  In  Feminism,  as 
in  other  movements,  it  is  the  minority  and 
not  the  majority  that  matters.  It  is  for  this 
reason  I  venture,  as  a  declared  Feminist,  to 
lay  down  certain  opinions  ;  it  matters  little 
whether  they  be  agreeable  to  many,  it 
matters  very  much  whether  they  be  agree- 
able to  some.  And  I  repeat  that  opinions 
are  not  rules:  a  discussion  of  Feminism 
must,  at  the  present  stage  of  social  develop- 
ment, be  considered  principally  as  a 
stimulant. 

Feminism  can  be  defined  broadly  as  a 
furthering  of  the  interests  of  women,  more 
specifically  as  the  social  and  political 
emancipation  of  woman,  and  philosophically 
as  the  levelling  of  the  sexes.  The  three 
definitions  have  their  value,  especially  their 
application  value,  for  they  enable  the 
exponent,  in  a  Jesuitical  spirit,  to  convert 
with  the  one  formula  persons  to  whom  the 
3 


WOMAN  AND  TO-MORROW 

other  two  would  mean  nothing.  The  first 
is,  however,  somewhat  dishonest;  the  second 
is  sound  but  theoretic ;  the  third  embodies 
our  immediate  aims.  To  further  woman's 
happiness  or  interests  may  indeed  be  taken 
in  different  ways.  A  number  of  white  men 
are  still  imbued  with  the  harem  idea.  They 
have,  it  is  true,  called  it  "  home,"  taken  a 
hare  and  baptised  it  "  carp " ;  they  have 
relaxed  the  harem  regulations,  but  in  the 
main  they  still  believe  in  "woman's  sphere." 
They  do  not  confine  women  by  means  of 
bars  and  bolts,  but  still  attempt  to  limit 
their  activities,  to  throw  them  back  on  their 
household,  their  household  gods  and  the 
household  god — the  husband.  Naturally 
this  does  not  appeal  to  us,  who  consider 
that  "  Homo  sum :  humani  nihil  a  me 
alienum  putto  "  should  include  woman  to- 
gether with  man.  Those  men  who  wish  to 
exclude  woman  from  certain  occupations, 
to  discourage  the  exercise  of  her  discretion 
in  the  choice  of  friends  and  pleasures,  to 
maintain  her  in  a  state  of  favoured  sub- 
jection, may  love  woman  very  deeply,  but 
much  as  they  love  their  dog.  Their  attitude 
4 


GENERAL 


is  that  of  the  Victorian  sentimentalist  who 
never  laid  his  hand  upon  woman  save  in 
the  way  of  patronage.  For  this  reason  the 
definition  is  inadequate. 

The  social  and  political  emancipation  of 
woman  corresponds  far  better  to  the  true 
meaning  of  Feminists;  it  includes  Suffragism, 
but  is  not  limited  by  it.  Indeed,  Feminists 
look  upon  Suffragism  as  no  more  than  a 
part  of  their  programme ;  they  invest  its 
obtention  and  its  use  with  no  sacred  quality. 
It  is  for  them  but  one  of  the  steps  which 
should  be  taken,  and  it  is  not  proven  that 
Feminism  cannot  succeed  unless  women 
have  votes.  The  development  of  Syndi- 
calism, of  which  we  know  little  save  the 
early  stages,  tends  to  show  how  greatly 
overrated  is  political  pressure,  how  much 
swifter  and  more  drastic  action  can  be  when 
it  is  freed  from  the  childish  formalities  of 
procedure.  The  sex-Syndicalism  to  which 
Feminists  may  yet  resort  should  be  a  far 
more  efficient  weapon  than  the  more  or 
less  purchasable  polling-slip  men  have  for 
so  many  generations  dropped  into  the  Lethe 
of  the  ballot-box.  We  wish  to  establish 


WOMAN  AND  TO-MORROW 

that  the  intellectual  capacities  of  the  two 
sexes,  though  different,  are  not  unequal. 
We  do  not  contend  that  a  woman  will  make 
a  good  soldier,  sailor,  judge,  foreign  minister, 
railway  guard,  or  horse  slaughterer,  but 
we  do  contend  that  she  should  not  be 
debarred  by  law  or  by  custom  from  com- 
peting for  these  more  or  less  valuable 
offices.  We  ask  that  woman  should  be 
allowed  to  enter  the  lists,  and  that  she 
should  not  receive  a  handicap.  At  present 
male  society  either  favours  women  or 
hampers  them :  it  is  unable  to  look  upon 
them  as  rivals  or  equals,  but  must  consider 
them  as  humble  collaborators  or  as  gracious 
queens.  The  Feminist  claim  is  that  they 
should  be  considered  merely  as  human 
beings. 

It  will  be  seen  in  the  chapters  that  follow 
in  what  directions  emancipation  is  required. 
The  suffrage  agitation  has  cast  so  lurid  a 
light  upon  many  of  these  that  it  will  not 
be  necessary  to  dilate  upon  them.  The 
material  sex-disabilities,  such  as  the  ex- 
clusion of  women  from  the  legal  profession, 
their  partial  exclusion  from  priestcraft,  the 
6 


GENERAL 


quasi-inaccessibility  of  the  Honours  List, 
the  denial  of  a  vote  and  of  the  faculty  to  sit 
in  Parliament  (even  when  they  possess  a 
barony  in  their  own  right),  their  ineligibility 
to  Freemasonry — these  are  not  in  the  Fem- 
inist view  the  vital  grievances  of  women. 
Feminist  action  is  directed  against  attitudes 
rather  than  against  situations ;  its  desire  is 
to  abolish  in  men  a  state  of  mind  which  it 
considers  evil,  suicidal,  and  cruel.  Briefly 
it  aims  at  a  mental  rather  than  at  a  material 
adjustment  of  relations.  It  is  essentially 
philosophic. 

I  do  not  suggest  that  sex-disabilities 
must  not  be  removed.  They  must  and  they 
will  be  removed,  as  they  have  been  to  a 
greater  or  lesser  degree  in  certain  States ; 
but  this  again  is  but  part  of  the  Feminist 
programme.  It  is  not  enough  that  New 
Zealand  should  give  women  votes ;  it  does 
not  even  satisfy  us  that  Norway  allows 
women  to  sit  in  Parliament.  We  want  a 
mental  recognition  of  status,  for  there  is  no 
true  status  without  a  mental  recognition. 
The  removal  of  sex-disabilities  does  not  of 
itself  alter  the  status  of  woman ;  being 
7 


WOMAN  AND  TO-MORROW 

a  product  of  public  opinion,  the  status  of 
woman  can  be  modified  solely  by  the  result 
upon  men's  minds  of  the  equalising  of  sex- 
conditions.  The  levelling  tendencies  of 
Feminism  are  best  understood  if  we  resort 
to  a  simple  illustration.  I  cannot  trace  the 
exact  date  when  women  began  to  smoke 
cigarettes ;  I  imagine  that  the  practice 
followed  upon  the  great  stiff-collar-and- 
bloomer  movement  of  the  eighties,  but 
that  is  not  important.  What  is  important 
is  that,  at  the  inception,  a  woman  who 
smoked  cigarettes  was  regarded  as  loose ; 
then,  and  little  by  little,  she  was  allowed  to 
smoke  in  public,  until  to-day,  in  all  save  the 
most  collet-monte  circles,  no  protest  arises 
when  a  woman  takes  a  cigarette  from  her 
case.  So  far  that  is  what  the  Suffragists 
would  call  a  victory:  the  prohibition  has 
been  removed.  But  the  Feminists  go  further. 
They  find  that,  in  certain  circles,  a  woman 
need  no  longer  smoke  covertly,  apologeti- 
cally, or  archly ;  she  merely  smokes,  and  a 
man  will  offer  her  a  cigarette  as  casually 
as  he  would  to  another  man.  Therein  lies 
the  difference  of  degree  between  Suffragism 


GENERAL 


and  Feminism :  we  do  not  attach  much 
importance  to  the  removal  of  the  disability, 
but  we  attach  immense  importance  to  the 
fact  that  some  men  have  forgotten  that 
there  ever  was  a  disability.  It  is  not  what 
women  may  do  that  matters,  but  the  taking  for 
granted  of  what  they  may  do. 

It  appears  at  once  that  Feminism  is 
infinitely  more  greedy  than  Suffragism. 
We  are  not  content  with  the  more  or  less 
sterile  products  of  the  ballot-box ;  we  wish 
to  arrive  at  a  state  when  the  differences 
between  men  and  women  will  be  reduced 
to  sexual  differences,  because  those  alone 
are  natural.  It  would  be  absurd  to  contend 
that  women  are,  at  present,  the  equals  of 
men.  They  are  not ;  as  individuals,  even, 
they  are  inferior,  physically,  mentally  and 
intellectually — which  does  not  mean  that  a 
George  Sand  is  inferior  to  the  average 
coal-heaver.  But  George  Sand  was  certainly 
inferior  to,  say,  Balzac,  while  the  coal- 
heaver  is  almost  invariably  far  ahead  of  his 
wife  so  far  as  education  and  public  spirit 
are  concerned.  To  refuse  to  acknowledge 
this,  to  put  forward  the  single  swallows  of 
9  B 


WOMAN  AND  TO-MORROW 

Joan  of  Arc,  Catherine  of  Russia,  Mary 
Wollstonecraft,  etc.,  against  the  gorgeous 
battalions  of  masculine  genius  is  an  absurd 
and  suicidal  error.  Feminists  will  not  set 
up  Aunt  Sallies  for  their  enemies.  That 
which  has  been  need  not,  however,  always 
be;  we  are  bold  enough  to  believe  that 
woman  has  had  no  opportunity  in  the 
Feminist  sense  since  the  intellectual  life 
of  the  world  began.  Notably  in  the  arts 
the  works  of  women  have  not  been  judged 
as  works,  but  as  the  works  of  women,  and 
that  spirit  is  the  one  we  wish  to  destroy. 

We  must  consider  that  the  education  of 
women  is  essentially  a  novelty.  I  do  not 
refer  to  elementary  education,  for,  in  this 
sense,  the  education  of  men  is  also  a  novelty, 
but  to  the  broader  education  which  lies  be- 
yond the  school-book,  the  education  in 
character,  responsibility,  and  public  interest. 
So  long  as  women  were  looked  upon  as 
chattels  their  education  was  wasted — that  is, 
such  education  as  they  were  given,  namely, 
a  blend  of  artistic  training  and  household 
economy.  It  is  not  what  one  learns  that 
matters,  but  what  one  is  allowed  to  know. 

10 


GENERAL 


Here  again  the  Feminist  point  of  view 
appears :  we  do  not  think  it  material  that 
girls  should  learn  engineering,  but  we  do 
wish  to  attain  a  social  condition  where  no 
one  will  be  surprised  because  they  learn 
engineering.  We  attach  far  more  value  to 
the  formation  of  their  character  than  to 
knowledge  they  may  acquire. 

This  question  of  character  lies  at  the 
root  of  Feminism.  We  believe  that  if  the 
majority  of  women  are  what  they  are,  in- 
accurate, petty,  calumnious,  dishonourable, 
and  vain,  it  is  because  everything  that  could 
be  done  to  develop  these  traits  in  them  has 
been  done.  The  ages  have  given  woman 
the  status  of  the  slave  and  developed  in  her 
the  characteristics  of  the  slave ;  we  believe 
that  by  inverting  conditions,  causing  her  to 
develop  in  freedom,  we  can  give  her  the  char- 
acteristics of  the  free  woman.  We  do  not 
believe  that  women  are  inherently  inaccurate, 
petty,  calumnious,  dishonourable,  and  vain, 
and  we  can  prove  our  contention  by  point- 
ing to  those  women  who  have  been  partially 
emancipated  by  the  arts  and  the  trades. 
In  the  midst  of  the  great  inferior  majority 

IX 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

a  class  of  woman  has  grown  up  in  the  course 
of  the  last  twenty  or  thirty  years,  which  is 
serious  (sometimes  too  serious),  public- 
spirited,  and  honest.  That  is  the  arts  and 
crafts  worker,  the  school  teacher,  the  female 
doctor,  the  government  inspector ;  briefly 
it  is  the  type  which,  by  earning  its  own 
livelihood,  has  learned  to  hold  up  its  head. 
If  numbers  of  women  have  thus  been  freed 
from  the  vices  of  their  sex,  induced  by  the 
tyranny  of  the  other  sex,  we  feel  justified 
in  contending  that  there  are  among  the 
women  still  enslaved  an  immense  number 
of  candidates  for  freedom. 

It  is  not  necessary  for  the  Feminist  to 
prove  that  every  woman  is  a  potentially 
efficient  person,  for  it  is  evident  that  all 
men  are  not  efficient.  Indeed,  if  our  standard 
be  at  all  high  we  must  admit  that  a  high 
degree  of  skill  and  strength  of  character 
is  uncommon  among  men.  Among  men 
laziness,  stupidity  and  grossness  abound ; 
while  woman  shows  the  characteristics  of 
the  slave,  man  shows  those  of  the  slave- 
owner. He  is  in  the  main  selfish,  ignorant, 
and  brutal ;  secure  in  his  power,  he  feels 


GENERAL 

secure  in  a  superiority  which  is  often  self- 
complacent  vacuousness.  We  must  not  be 
carried  away  by  the  names  of  Raphael, 
Shakespeare,  George  Stephenson,  and 
Dostoievsky ;  we  must  not  be  discouraged 
because  there  have  been  no  female  geniuses. 
Woman  has  not  had  time.  I  am  inclined 
to  believe  with  Mme.  M.  L.  Almeras  *  that 
"  at  the  elementary  bases  of  her  great, 
ancient  forces,  sleep  the  germs  of  a  creative 
intellect,  of  an  order  and  a  new  genius 
which,  to  mature,  need  naught  save 
freedom." 

Moreover,  the  development  of  genius 
does  not  concern  our  body  politic.  I  am 
not  prepared  to  say  that  la  Republiqne  n'a 
pas  besom  de  savants,  but  I  think  it  more 
immediately  necessary  to  raise  our  general 
status  than  to  dream  of  eugenically  produc- 
ing another  giant  of  science  or  of  art.  It 
is  questionable  whether  an  adequate  person 
such  as  Ruskin  has  not  more  greatly 
influenced  his  nation  than  has  the  solitary 
and  aristocratic  genius  of  George  Meredith. 

*  "  L'Evasion,"    par    Madame    M.    L.    Almeras 
(Calmann-Levy,  Paris,  3  frs.  50). 

'3 


WOMAN   AND  TO-MORROW 

The  Feminists  are  not  directly  concerned 
with  genius;  they  believe  that  within  woman- 
hood may  be  found  a  mute,  inglorious 
Milton,  but  they  are  not  looking  for  the 
seer.  They  wish  to  establish  that  the  pro- 
portion of  generally  efficient  women  is  as 
great  as  the  proportion  of  efficient  men ; 
this  being  established  they  claim  that  those 
women  should  not  be  looked  upon  as  essen- 
tially different  from  men,  but  as  essentially 
similar  to  them. 

It  appears  from  the  above  that  the 
Feminist  has  before  him  a  task  far  more 
difficult,  because  far  more  elusive,  than  has 
the  Suffragist.  It  is  comparatively  easy  to 
gain  a  material  end,  but  it  is  very  difficult 
to  alter  a  point  of  view.  The  vote  that 
men  reluctantly  concede,  the  policy  to 
which  they  dishonestly  pledge  themselves 
because  they  hope  to  be  paid  by  results — 
these  solid  gains  do  not  content  us.  It  will 
not  serve  us  if  laws  are  in  the  future  directed 
against  man  as  they  were  once  directed 
against  woman ;  it  will  not  serve  us  to 
establish  by  force  that  which  was  once 
established  by  favour,  for  we  do  not  aim 
14 


GENERAL 


at  an  unequal  state.  An  idea  is  abroad 
that  women  look  upon  themselves  as  the 
superior  sex  and  believe  that  they  should 
rule  the  world ;  a  few  do  hold  this  distorted 
view,  a  view  as  distorted  as  that  of  men, 
who  still  look  upon  themselves  as  the  natural 
rulers ;  but  the  main  body  of  Feminist 
opinion  is  not  so  blind  to  its  own  aims.  We 
wish  to  establish  a  state  of  balance  when 
sex-differences  will  remain,  but  when  sex- 
privileges  will  vanish.  We  rise  as  angrily 
against  the  laws  by  which  women  alone 
benefit  as  against  those  by  which  they  alone 
suffer  ;  we  wish  to  establish  such  a  condition 
that  the  statute  book  shall  not  contain  the 
word  "  man  "  and  the  word  "  woman,"  but 
shall  substitute  therefor  the  word  "  person." 
This  attitude  drives  us  to  logical  extremes, 
such  as  opening  to  women  the  ranks  of  the 
army,  but  there  is  no  reason  why  we  should 
do  in  practice  that  which  we  do  in  principle. 
There  is  one  thing  which  does  not  matter 
in  politics,  and  that  is  principle.  I  will 
not  be  drawn  into  a  puerile  discussion  of 
feminine  regiments :  the  idea  is  absurd. 
Enthusiasts  have  unfortunately  alleged  that 
15 


WOMAN   AND  TO-MORROW 

the  female  animal  is  improving,  and  the 
male  decaying,  and  believe  this  may  ulti- 
mately tip  the  scale  ;  they  have  named  half 
a  dozen  women  warriors,  but  in  the  main 
they  have  done  damage  to  Feminism.  I 
think  we  must  consider  certain  occupations 
and  practices  as  physically  closed  to  women, 
but  we  must  not  accept  that  because  women 
are  not  fit  for  certain  things  they  are  not  fit 
for  other  things.  And  it  should  be  said,  by 
the  way,  that  we  do  not  set  a  child  of  ten  at 
puddling  iron,  but  we  do  not  despise  the 
child.  And  we  do  not  ask  a  would-be 
Prime  Minister  whether  he  can  puddle  iron. 
The  Feminist  wishes  therefore  to  bring 
about  a  moral  revolution  based  on  a  material 
revolution.  We  put  some  of  our  trust,  but 
not  all,  in  the  Suffragist  agitation  ;  we  think 
to  draw  from  it  the  concrete  advantages  on 
which  we  hope  to  build  the  new  conscious- 
ness. But  the  vote  is  not  our  battle ;  it  is 
an  affair  in  the  van.  The  Feminist  army 
behind  has  an  objective  of  its  own  and  will 
attain  it  by  its  own  methods.  It  is  impos- 
sible, at  present,  to  say  exactly  what  these 
methods  will  be  if  one  fears  to  flounder  in 
16 


GENERAL 


a  morass  of  Utopia  ;  political  action  will 
certainly  be  our  instrument,  but  feminine 
opinion  will  have  to  be  more  fully  aroused. 
Feminists  propose  to  break  into  the  pre- 
served professions,  to  reform  the  education 
of  girls,  to  subject  them  to  an  equivalent 
of  military  training  and  possibly  to  estab- 
lish sumptuary  laws.  The  opening  of  the 
professions  is  a  small  matter,  but  will  be  a 
big  struggle ;  already  medicine  and  den- 
tistry are  open  ;  the  councils  of  the  Bar 
and  of  the  solicitors  will  have  to  be  coerced 
by  political  action.  I  repeat  that  we  do 
not  value  the  prize,  for  I  think  it  doubtful 
that  clients  will  readily  employ  women 
barristers  and  solicitors,  even  at  blackleg 
prices  ;  but  we  wish  to  attain  a  right. 
There  are  landowners  in  England  who  are 
entitled  to  stop  trains :  they  do  not  make 
a  practice  of  holding  up  expresses,  but 
they  maintain  their  rights  by  stopping 
one  train  every  year.  That  is  our  position 
in  regard  to  the  legal  profession.  We  do 
not  want  the  material  benefits  of  a  new 
occupation,  but  we  wish  to  remove  from  the 
minds  of  men  the  idea  that  a  woman  cannot 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

possibly  plead  in  a  court  of  law,  be  a  K.C. 
or  a  judge.  We  want  to  remove  the  restric- 
tion because  we  believe  that  restrictions 
make  slaves.* 

The  education  of  girls  is  a  larger  issue 
on  which  a  great  deal  might  be  written. 
It  has  been  much  improved  in  the  course 
of  the  last  half  century.  Miss  Beale's 
Cheltenham  School,  Girton,  Newnham, 
Bedford  College,  etc. — all  these  institutions 
have  given  to  the  education  of  women  a 
semblance  of  reality.  Their  imperfections 
are  those  of  English  schools  and  colleges  in 
general,  where  everything  is  respected  except 
learning  ;  they  will  vanish  if  and  when  they 
vanish  in  the  men's  faculties,  but  Feminists 
will  have  to  do  away  with  certain  obvious 
absurdities,  such  as  the  denial  of  degrees 
to  women  at  Oxford  and  Cambridge.  I 
repeat  that  Feminists  do  not  so  much  value 
Oxford  and  Cambridge  degrees  as  the  right 
to  enter  for  them  ;  they  are  aware  that  they 
can  obtain  as  good  an  education  in  the  new 
universities,  but  they  must  suppress  in  the 


*  See  "  Woman,"  by  Bebel. 
18 


GENERAL 


mind  of  their  brothers  the  idea  that  certain 
universities  may  be  reserved  for  them.  To 
do  away  with  these  restrictions  is,  however, 
but  to  scratch  the  surface  of  the  problem  ; 
the  education  itself  must  be  reformed  on 
Feminist  lines. 

Feminist  opinion,  like  lay  opinion,  is 
divided  on  co-education.  It  is  not,  in  the 
main,  hostile  to  a  system  which  embodies 
its  principles,  but  it  is  not  blind  to  the 
danger  of  equalising  sex  together  with  oppor- 
tunity. It  appears  that  co-education  tends 
to  make  girls  boisterous  and  rough,  the  boys 
soft  and  unenterprising  ;  it  does  not  produce 
a  single  sex,  but  it  tends  to  wipe  out  the 
outer  distinctions  of  the  sexes,  those  dis- 
tinctions by  favour  of  which  they  attract 
and  charm  each  other.  Feminists  are  too 
conscious  of  the  splendour  of  passion  to 
welcome  the  uniform  product  of  co-educa- 
tion ;  their  ideal  is  to  maintain  the  sharpest 
possible  physical  differences,  while  causing 
the  mental  and  intellectual  outlook  to 
become  the  same.  It  is  argued  in  favour 
of  co-education  that  it  teaches  the  sexes  to 
know  each  other,  to  become  accustomed  to 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

each  other :  if  this  is  true,  and  if  the  world 
is  to  be  co-educated,  the  most  beautiful 
thing  it  knows  will  assuredly  disappear. 
We  naturally  love  the  unknown  rather  than 
the  known ;  we  wish  to  maintain  the 
mystery  of  sex,  so  that  human  beings  may 
each  in  turn  discover  a  paradise.  It  is  not 
on  co-education  that  Feminism  relies,  but 
on  better  general  education,  on  the  crushing 
by  the  State  school  of  the  private  girls' 
school,  where  the  study  of  taste  and  the 
musical  glasses  leaves  little  time  for 
Shakespeare.  It  relies  also  on  the  more 
revolutionary  method  of  compulsory  school 
education  for  all  classes  up  to  a  relatively 
advanced  age,  probably  sixteen,  so  that 
girls  may  escape  the  willing  but  incom- 
petent governess :  the  education  of  girls 
must  not  be  made  the  prey  of  women  who 
adopt  teaching  because  they  do  not  know 
anything.  Lastly,  it  relies  upon  physical 
training. 

Physical  training  is  essentially  the 
equivalent  of  military  service.  If  we 
possessed  a  conscript  army,  compulsory 
physical  training  for  women  would  be 

20 


GENERAL 


enforceable.  It  is  not  Utopian  to  write  of  it, 
though,  for  there  are  many  rumours  of  war, 
and  it  will  not  be  surprising  if  "  compulsory 
volunteering  "  is  ultimately  passed  into  law. 
Feminism,  besides,  is  international ;  it  is 
not  solely  concerned  with  these  small  and 
retrograde  isles.  It  is  therefore  allowable 
to  say  that  Feminism  welcomes  the  idea 
of  a  period  in  camps,  where  games  will  be 
sedulously  practised,  together  with  nursing, 
field-work,  the  making  of  clothes  and  furni- 
ture, first-aid,  signalling,  etc.  The  object 
is  not  war,  it  is  physical  development,  and 
the  movement  is  not  unnecessary :  games 
are  played  at  Cheltenham,  but  they  are  not 
played  in  provided  schools.  As  for  the 
fitness  of  women  for  the  rougher  exercises, 
it  is  beyond  question ;  we  have  but  to  con- 
sider our  hockey,  lacrosse,  and  swimming 
teams,  and  the  growing  strength  of  the 
"  Girl  Guides."  I  feel  that  some  form  of 
compulsory  physical  training  will  greatly 
improve  the  chances  of  our  women  in  their 
contest  with  the  ruling  sex. 

Lastly,  and  I  must  be  excused  the  only 
Utopian   idea  I  have  put   forward   in   this 
ar 


WOMAN    AND   TO-MORROW 

essay,  there  are  the  sumptuary  laws.  I 
can  assign  no  date  to  their  drafting,  and  it 
is  likely  that  the  social  system  itself  will 
collapse  before  they  can  be  applied,*  but  I 
am  convinced  that  women  are  degraded  by 
their  insensate  desire  to  deck  themselves 
out  in  finery.  They  are  not  entirely  to 
blame;  being  slaves  they  must  strive  to 
please  so  as  to  acquire  a  protector,  together 
with  a  master ;  when  they  have  acquired  a 
protector  they  must  still  strive  to  please 
so  as  to  retain  his  favour.  But  they  are 
also  personally  to  blame  ;  they  are  com- 
peting, not  only  for  the  vicarious  exercise 
of  masculine  power,  which  would  be  legiti- 
mate enough,  but  they  strive  in  a  petty 
spirit  to  outshine  their  fellows,  because  they 
think  therein  to  find  a  sensation  of  victory. 
The  elegant  woman  does  not  want  to  be 
a  work  of  art ;  she  wants  to  insult  and 
humiliate  her  sister ;  she  values  her  rival's 
clothes  and  judges  her  according  to  their 
cost ;  she  steals  from  necessaries  the  price 
of  luxuries  and,  by  the  force  of  her  ex- 

*  See  "  The  Madras  House,"  by  Granville  Barker. 

22 


GENERAL 

ample,  becomes  a  social  pest.  I  do  not 
argue,  in  a  puritanical  spirit,  that  a  wealthy 
woman  should  dress  meanly;  there  would 
be  no  need  for  her  to  abstain  from  eighty- 
guinea  frocks  and  twenty-guinea  hats*  if 
her  fellows  could  afford  them  also.  Indeed, 
I  can  conceive  of  money  as  well  spent  on 
clothes,  if  only  because  "  to  be  well  dressed 
produces  a  holy  calm,"  but  it  is  not  good 
for  woman  in  general  that  the  calm  of  the 
one  should  be  bought  at  the  price  of 
another's  rage  and  humiliation.  It  may 
be  said  that  this  rage  and  humiliation  are 
evidences  of  weakness,  and  that  women 
should  be  "  above "  such  feelings ;  un- 
fortunately they  are  not  "above"  them, 
and  Feminism  must  take  into  account  that 
the  competing  slaves  suffer  bitterly  under 
the  handicap.  It  is  because  they  are 
slaves  that  they  suffer,  and  it  is  because  they 
suffer  that  they  remain  slaves.  The  anger  of 
the  working-man  who  beholds  the  rich  man 
in  his  motor-car  f  is  as  nothing  by  the  side 

*  These  prices  are  paid.     Indeed,  a  hat  has  cost 
fifty  guineas,  a  sable  coat  ,£"4,000. 

f  "  The  Labour  Unrest,"  by  H.  G.  Weils. 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

of  his  daughter's  anger  in  the  presence  of 
an  aigrette.  I  believe  that  a  proportion 
of  prostitution  is  directly  traceable  to  this 
cause.  It  may  be  that,  as  women  develop 
and  gain  status,  they  will  become  superior 
to  the  passion  for  ornament.  It  is  not 
desirable  that  they  should  become  altogether 
superior  to  it,  and  I  think  men  have  gone 
too  far  in  their  exclusion  from  their  own 
clothing  of  colours  and  delicate  stuffs ;  but 
women  should  be  helped  and  not  impeded, 
as  they  are  at  present  by  the  social  curse 
of  the  "  smart  "  woman.  It  is  not  necessary 
to  frame  here  even  tentative  sumptuary 
laws ;  but  the  idea  matters.  Feminism  in 
general  is  then  not  merely  selfish ;  it  aims 
at  raising  the  tone  of  women  as  it  raises 
their  status;  it  wishes  to  make  women 
worthy  of  the  honour  it  will  earn  for  them, 
and  to  make  of  their  womanhood  an  in- 
strument of  reform  as  well  as  of  self- 
elevation. 


II 

FEMINISM    AND   SUFFRAGISM 


II 

FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

I  DO  not  believe  that  women  are  fit  to 
have  a  vote.  That  is  why  I  want 
them  to  have  it.  I  am  convinced  that 
woman's  political  outlook  is  narrow,  pre- 
judiced, and  mean,  that  her  support  will,  at 
the  inception,  be  readily  accorded  to  any 
measure  that  is  definitely  sentimental  or 
definitely  brutal,  to  any  law  which  restricts 
public  expenditure  and  well-doing.*  If 
there  be  such  a  thing  as  progress  woman 
will  be  the  drag  upon  the  wheel.  It  is 
fruitless  to  argue  that  this  has  not  been  the 
case  in  New  Zealand,  for  we  must  deal  with 
women  in  general  and,  as  we  are  talking 
politics,  it  is  certain  that  Englishwomen 

*  It  must  be  understood  that  when,  in  this 
essay,  I  refer  to  "  woman  "  I  except  the  intellectual 
minority.  These  are  the  finger-posts  of  the  Feminist 
movement. 

27 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

know   far   more   of  politics   than  do   their 
sisters  in  Germany,  France,  and  the  United 
States.    But  they  do  not  know  much.    They 
are  governed  exclusively  by  their  passions 
and  their  interests.    They  coalesced  to  pro- 
cure the  repeal  of  the  Contagious  Diseases 
Act,  the   working  of  which  they  were   not 
familiar  with,    because   their   feelings   and 
not   their   minds   were   stirred.     I    do   not 
defend  the  Contagious  Diseases  Act ;  judg- 
ing   from    evidence    collected    in    foreign 
countries  it  appears  devoid  of  importance 
so  long  as  prostitution  endures.     Whether 
that   horrible    thing    be   regulated   or    not 
seems  unworthy   of  consideration,   for  the 
regulation  of  vice  in   Europe  has  done  no- 
body any  good  or  any  harm.     It  has  not 
lowered  the   mentality  of  the  foreign  pro- 
stitute, for  that  it  could  not  do ;  it  has  not 
lowered  the  standard  of  masculine  chivalry, 
for  that  also  it  could  not  do ;  it  has  neither 
improved     nor    damaged    the     health     of 
nations.     If    there   is    no  "  regulation    of 
vice  "  in  England  it  is  because  women  wept 
instead  of  thinking. 

Likewise    the   women   of  New   Zealand 
28 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

and  of  certain  American  states  procured 
the  enforcement  of  local  prohibition  ;  the 
naturally  healthy  hatred  of  drunkenness 
developed  in  them  into  fanaticism.  They 
exemplified  their  temperament,  that  of  the 
extremist.  Incapable  of  conceiving  that 
anybody  might  drink  in  moderation,  they 
decided  that  nobody  ought  to  drink  at  all. 
I  argue  more  definitely  against  prohibition 
than  against  the  repeal  of  the  Contagious 
Diseases  Act,  for  the  latter  does  not  matter, 
while  the  former  is  important.  Prohibition 
means  that  perfectly  normal  pleasures  have 
been  stolen  from  man's  scanty  store,  that 
conviviality  and  friendship  have  been 
impeded  and  whole  districts  charged  with 
weakness  of  mind.  Alcohol  may  be  an 
evil,  but  we  have  still  to  learn  that  the 
brave  man  is  the  one  who  runs  away  from 
it.  If  women  supported  prohibition  it  was, 
in  the  first  place,  because  they  jumped  to 
conclusions  and  believed  that  if  men  were 
allowed  to  drink  they  would  become 
drunkards  ;  it  was,  in  the  second  place, 
because  they  were  so  moved  by  the  sight  of 
the  drunkard's  wife  and  child  that  they 
29 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

decided  no  bachelor  should  be  allowed 
alcohol.  The  New  Zealand  prohibition 
laws  have  been  evaded  in  many  ways,  *  but 
they  are  important  as  indicating  women's 
tendencies. 

Lastly,  there  is  public  expenditure.  The 
cry  of  woman  is  invariably  :  "  Reduce  the 
rates."  Apart  from  those  women  who  have 
joined  political  associations,  women  who 
swallow  the  programme  of  their  party, 
which  is  usually  that  of  their  men-folk, 
women  electors  are  almost  invariably 
ranged  in  local  elections  against  any  party 
which  proposes  to  spend  money.  This  is 
well  known  among  political  canvassers  ; 
it  is  no  use  going  to  them  with  measures  of 
generosity  unless  the  generosity  is  to  begin 
in  their  own  homes.  It  follows  that  they 
would  be  equally  avaricious  if  they  con- 
trolled imperial  taxation,  that  they  would 
vote  solid  against  measures  such  as  Old 
Age  Pensions,  Workmen's  Compensation, 
Health  Insurance,  etc.  Indeed,  the  out- 
bursts in  the  Press,  signed  with  feminine 

*  See  "  New  Zealand  and  Its  Politics,"  by  Percy 
A.  Harris,  L.C.C. 

30 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

names,  when  the  Compensation  Acts  were 
extended  to  servants  and  when  the  Insur- 
ance Act  was  brought  in,  the  meetings  and 
the  petitions,  indicate  how  averse  are 
women  to  spending  money. 

It  is  evident,  therefore,  that  the  addition 
to  the  register  of  a  number  of  women  will, 
so  far  as  the  opinion  of  the  voters  reacts 
upon  the  legislators,  herald  in  an  era  of 
cruelty,  sentimentality,  and  meanness.  If 
the  voter  were  effectively  represented  by 
his  representative  I  should,  Feminist  as  I 
am,  shrink  from  the  idea  of  inflicting  upon 
the  world  the  laws  women  would  favour. 
They  would  refuse  money  to  education,  to 
land  development,  and  to  labour,  but  they 
would  gladly  spend  it  on  inspiring  troops 
and  ships ;  they  would,  in  the  fine  words  of 
Mr.  Stewart  Headlam,  confront  the  children 
and,  in  lieu  of  bread,  give  them  flagstaff's. 
The  revolution  will  not  go  thus  far,  but 
only  because  the  male  legislators  will  save 
the  situation  by  violating  their  mandate. 
The  years  that  follow  the  introduction  of 
women's  suffrage  will  be  uneasy  and  chaotic, 
and  many  ugly  things  may  be  done,  but 
31 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

Feminists  believe  that  the  initial  chaos  is 
inevitable,  that  women  can,  no  more  than 
men,  evolve  into  human  beings  without 
making  mistakes. 

I  believe  that  chaos  and  error  are  essential 
if  woman  is  to  come  into  her  kingdom.  If 
it  is  accepted  that  women  in  general  are 
as  I  paint  them,  politically  narrow,  passionate 
and  mean,  it  is  important  to  ask  ourselves 
why  they  are  in  such  a  mental  condition. 
These  characteristics  are  not  those  of  the 
slave,  but  of  the  half-educated,  and  this 
remark  is  immensely  significant  if  there  be 
any  virtue  in  my  case.  Their  attitude 
towards  such  measures  as  the  Contagious 
Diseases  Act,  capital  punishment,  the 
white-slave  traffic,  prohibition,  is  essentially 
unreflecting.  I  do  not  suggest  that  the 
male  voter  is  much  better  posted  on  Tariff 
Reform  or  land  questions,  but  he  is  more 
educated,  and  therefore  more  inclined  to 
weigh  pros  and  cons ;  he  is  not  so  readily 
carried  away  by  gusts  of  passion.  He  is 
hardened,  sometimes  ossified,  but  generally 
he  is  as  good  a  product  as  can  be  expected 
under  a  broad  franchise.  Woman  has  not 
32 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

had  the  political  education  which  can  be 
obtained  by  an  illiterate  man ;  it  has  for 
many  years  been  open  to  her  to  study 
public  questions,  to  read,  if  she  fancies, 
political  economy,  history  and  philosophy, 
but  she  has  never  had  the  essentially 
"  sporting  "  stimulus  of  being  an  elector. 

Those  who  have  taken  part  in  elections 
will  understand  my  point.  They  know  how 
electors  are  canvassed,  loaded  with  litera- 
ture in  the  streets,  how  they  are  pursued  into 
their  houses  by  argumentative  speakers, 
how  their  letter-boxes  are  choked  with 
pamphlets,  how  they  are  begged,  forced  to 
attend  meetings.  Women  have  not  been 
treated  in  that  way.  While  men  have  for 
eighty  years  been  compelled  to  listen  to 
the  banging  of  the  political  drums,  women 
have  been  asked  to  work  like  machines  in 
committee  rooms,  to  look  pretty  when 
putting  to  the  voters  questions  they  did  not 
themselves  understand;  elections  have  for 
them  been,  not  elections,  but  the  wearing 
of  favours.  Politicians  have,  besides,  found 
out  that  women  are  snobs  ;  the  Primrose 
League  and  the  Liberal  Social  Council  are 
33 


WOMAN    AND   TO-MORROW 

nothing  but  vast  organisations  the  object 
of  which  is  to  enable  the  common  people  to 
shake  hands  with  Countesses  and  Cabinet 
Ministers'  wives ;  when  they  wanted  to  use 
women,  politicians  pandered  to  them, 
offered  them  in  lieu  of  political  education  a 
sticky  compound  of  patronage  and  tea. 
Everything  that  was  low  in  woman  has 
been  made  lower,  because  the  lowest  minds 
are  the  most  malleable ;  everything  that  is 
noble  and  passionate  has  been  neglected 
because  it  would  have  been  a  nuisance. 
Politicians  found  it  advantageous  to  have 
women  stupid  and  pretty ;  as  they  had  no 
votes  there  was  no  need  to  cultivate  their 
minds. 

It  is  because  of  this  mental  condition 
that  an  extraordinary  blend  of  Imperialism 
and  avarice  has  developed  in  the  feminine 
mind ;  because  they  are  ignorant  they  have 
been  intoxicated  by  flag-wagging,  and 
because  they  are  ignorant  they  do  not 
realise  that  flag-wagging  means  the  swollen 
estimates  they  detest.  I  do  not  attack 
Imperialism :  I  am  perfectly  convinced 
that  Lord  Curzon,  Lord  Milner,  Mr. 
34 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

Chamberlain,  Sir  Leander  Jameson,  have 
in  their  minds  a  coherent  plan,  believe  (and 
rightly  believe)  that  ours  is  the  finest 
Western  civilisation  the  lower  races  can 
be  subjected  to,  but  I  am  as  firmly  con- 
vinced that  Imperialism  among  women  is 
naught  save  a  muddy,  sanguinary  dream. 
There  is  no  philosophic  view  in  their  talk, 
but  there  is  vainglory;  their  Imperialism 
is  that  of  a  mafficking  crowd,  an  affair 
of  regiments  marching  past  while  the 
band  plays  "  The  British  Grenadiers." 
For  them  it  never  plays  "  The  Girl  I  Left 
Behind  Me."  And  they  think,  vaguely  but 
insistently,  of  blood,  of  the  map  painted 
red  with  it ;  they  are  not  consciously  but 
unconsciously  cruel ;  they  are  sadistic ; 
there  is  an  air  about  war,  a  dramatic  touch 
which  seduces  them,  which  does  not  seduce 
the  men,  who  know  that  war  means  mainly 
empty  stomachs  and  wet  boots,  lying  in 
the  dirt  and  firing  at  nothing.  Yet  they 
resent  expenditure,  they  turn  towards  any 
remedy,  Tariff  Reform,  "  making  the 
foreigner  pay,"  so  that  they  may  have 
their  Imperial  cake  and  eat  it. 
35 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

How  could  it  be  otherwise  ?  How  many 
women  know  anything  about  history, 
ancient  or  modern  ?  or  foreign  politics  ? 
What  woman  knows  the  views  of  Mr.  von 
Kiderlen-Waechter  or  the  difference  be- 
tween the  American  Republicans  and  the 
Democrats  ?  Few  men,  and,  I  presume, 
fewer  women  can  define  the  Monroe  doctrine 
or  the  status  of  the  Congo.  Yet  it  is  these 
untutored  minds  write,  agitate  and  speak. 
The  speeches  of  political  women,  often 
capable  when  dealing  with  internal  topics, 
are  ludicrous  when  they  discuss  foreign,  i.e. 
Imperial  affairs.  The  education  of  men  is 
bad  enough  :  the  education  of  women  does 
not  exist.  I  am  so  sanguine  as  to  think 
that  the  vote  will  help  them. 

That  is  the  centre  of  my  position  as  a 
Feminist.  I  believe  that  the  vote,  and 
nothing  but  the  vote,  will  induce  women  to 
study  the  questions  on  which  they  now 
hold  forth  with  the  violence  of  the  ignorant. 
They  will,  in  the  first  place,  be  courted 
by  party  politicians,  for  they  will,  for  a 
generation,  be  looked  upon  as  the  new,  the 
doubtful  voters.  Now  every  experienced 
36 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

politician  knows  that  it  is  not  the  stalwarts 
who  matter ;  they  need  no  convincing,  for  they 
know  on  which  side  they  vote,  even  if  they  do 
not  know  why  they  so  vote  :  it  is  the  "  doubt- 
fuls"  who  turn  the  scale.  While  the  stalwarts 
mechanically  go  to  the  poll  the  "doubtfuls" 
hold  back,  shift  their  allegiance,  or  refuse 
to  enter  the  booth;  it  is  they  must  be 
captured.  Therein  lies  woman's  immense 
chance.  For  a  number  of  years  the  female 
vote  will  be  capable  of  turning  the  scale ; 
wherever  the  women  vote  solid  their  side 
will  win,  and  the  politicians  will  at  once 
realise  the  fact :  it  is  the  kind  of  fact  they 
do  realise.  I  do  not,  by  the  way,  believe 
that  women  will  vote  solid  ;  they  will  divide 
as  naturallyas  do  the  men,  but  the  politicians 
will  for  a  long  time  hope  to  capture  them 
en  bloc,  and  it  is  therefore  upon  the  women 
they  will  concentrate ;  it  is  they  will  be 
pestered,  converted  and  re-converted ;  it 
is  they  will  receive  leaflets,  pamphlets, 
invitations  to  meetings.  Indeed,  the  com- 
bined force  of  the  politicians  in  every  party 
will  be  mobilised  for  them.  The  result 
will,  at  first,  be  intellectual  chaos.  Women 
37 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

will  be  asked  to  assimilate  enormous  sub- 
jects, such  as  the  Tariff  Reform  idea,  land 
questions,  imperial  taxation ;  they  will  be 
hopelessly  puzzled,  and,  like  the  men,  often 
vote  stupidly,  but  their  travail  will  not  be 
in  vain.  It  has  been  said  that  before  the 
Tariff  Reform  agitation  England  did  not 
know  the  meaning  of  the  word  "  economics  " ; 
this  is  true,  and  no  one  will  deny  that  the 
agitation  has  endowed  the  electors  with  a 
certain  amount  of  information.  It  is  garbled, 
lying  information  for  the  most  part,  for 
many  individuals,  on  both  sides,  have  been 
quite  unscrupulous,  but  it  has  started 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  minds  upon  a 
quest  for  economic  truth. 

That  is  largely  what  I  hope  for  women. 
I  think  their  new  dignities  will  compel  them 
to  come  to  grips  with  political  questions ; 
they  will  not  be  allowed  to  ignore  their 
powers  by  those  who  have  honour  and 
four  hundred  pounds  a  year  to  gain.  The 
vote  means  that  women  will  be  bullied  into 
learning  what  modern  movements  mean. 
In  direct  combination  with  this  will  come 
education  by  newspaper,  an  education  which 
38 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

I  venture  to  think  more  important  for  the 
average  mind  than  any  which  can  be  drawn 
from  books.  At  present  women  do  not 
read  newspapers.  To  "  read "  does  not 
mean  to  read  the  accounts  of  murders, 
divorces  and  smart  weddings,  to  look  at 
the  pictures  and  the  fashion-plates ;  to 
"  read  "  means  at  least  to  skim  the  Parlia- 
mentary debates,  to  glance  at  the  foreign 
cables  and  the  political  leader.  That  is 
not  very  much,  but  it  is  left  undone. 
Women  wander  in  an  artificial  world  where 
national  concerns  are  left  to  men ;  they 
are  busy  with  little  things.  A  journey,  any 
morning,  in  a  railway  carriage  will  prove 
me  right ;  one  man  in  ten  readers  may 
hold  a  shilling  classic,  but  the  others  can 
be  seen  wading  through  morning  papers. 
I  do  not  suggest  that  they  avoid  the  police 
news,  the  sports,  and  the  railway  accidents, 
but  I  do  know  that  they  preserve  their 
papers  through  the  day,  and,  after  having 
skimmed  the  cream  of  sensation  in  the 
train,  consume  the  more  solid  fare  of 
politics  with  their  lunch.  Meanwhile  the 
women  glance  at  picture  papers,  are 
39 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

engrossed  in  the  serial,  or  replace  the  paper 
by  a  penny  novelette  of  the  lowest  type ; 
others  carry  with  them  the  more  hollow 
six-shilling  novels. 

The  vote  will  change  all  that.  Women 
will  not  be  able  indefinitely  to  resist  the 
political  canvasser;  they  will  argue  between 
themselves  and  with  the  men.  If  victorious 
their  taste  for  politics  will  grow,  for  it  is 
truer  of  women  than  of  men  that  nothing 
succeeds  like  success ;  if  beaten  their 
qualities  of  industry  and  doggedness  will 
compel  them  to  obtain  weapons  for  the 
struggle.  It  is  the  newspaper  will  give 
them  their  weapons  ;  they  will  read  to  find 
a  basis  for  their  political  faith.  This  will 
not  be  a  good  basis ;  it  will  be  biassed, 
crude,  for  no  newspaper  has  space  enough 
to  print  the  course  of  the  London  School 
of  Economics ;  but  it  will  no  longer  be  the 
old  basis  of  prejudice  and  bawling.  It  will 
be  a  sentient,  reflective  basis ;  the  news- 
paper will  cease  to  be  the  tragic  waste  of  a 
halfpenny. 

Briefly  I  believe  that  the  vote,  by 
stimulating  woman's  mind,  will  compel  her 
4o 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

to  reduce  in  her  judgments  the  influence  of 
her  passions.  I  do  not  suppose  that  woman 
will  ever  become  as  uninstinctive  as  man, 
nor  is  it  desirable  she  should,  for  there  is 
a  social  value  in  passion  to  which  I  shall 
refer  further  on ;  but  she  must  become 
more  logical.  Logic  alone  is  worthless, 
but  passion  alone  is  worthless  ;  if  woman 
is  compelled  to  weigh  arguments  instead  of 
saying  something  offensive  about  "  a  petti- 
fogging Welsh  lawyer,"  or  "  a  bloated 
duke,"  as  the  case  may  be,  she  will  be 
better  worth  listening  to.  And  if  she 
becomes  better  worth  listening  to  her  status 
will  rise.  It  is  not  the  code  she  may 
establish  by  means  of  her  vote  that  pre- 
occupies Feminists,  but  the  increased 
respect  that  must  come  to  her  when  she 
is  worthy  of  respect.  We  want  men  to 
think  better  of  women ;  that  is  our  battle, 
but  we  realise  plainly  that  men  are  not 
fools  and  that  they  will  not  respect  women 
until  women  are  worthy  of  respect. 

Believing  as  I  do  that  woman  is  potenti- 
ally  cleverer  than  man,  more  industrious, 
keener — though  I  do  not  claim  that  she  is 
41  D 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 


more  creative — I  have  no  doubt  that  she 
will  justify  the  claim  which  the  vote  will 
compel  her  to  assert.  That  woman  is 
cleverer  than  man  is  a  debatable  proposi- 
tion, even  if  we  introduce  the  useful 
adjective  "  potential."  I  am  inclined  boldly 
to  beg  the  question  and  to  say  :  If  woman 
has  become  as  clever  as  she  is  under  slavish 
conditions,  how  much  cleverer  would  she  not 
have  been  if  the  conditions  had  been  ideal  ? 
This  is  bad  logic,  but  we  are  working  on 
hypothesis  and  induction ;  the  known  facts 
are  few,  and  the  existence  of  some  thou- 
sands of  intellectual  women  partly  justifies 
us  in  saying  that  the  possibilities  of  woman 
are  great.  I  do  not  want  to  rate  too  high 
the  qualities  of  Mrs.  Fawcett,  Mme.  Curie, 
"  Lucas  Malet,"  the  Countess  of  Warwick, 
or  of  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward,  but  I  do 
submit  that  if  these  women  have  attained  an 
undoubted  (if  varying)  degree  of  eminence 
in  the  eyes  of  their  generation,  they  have 
attained  it  in  the  face  of  difficulties  which 
did  not  confront  their  men-folk.  They 
have  never  drawn  a  bill  on  the  bank  of 
fame  without  paying  a  heavy  discount. 
42 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

I  incline,  therefore,  to  think  that  if  the 
sex  point  of  view  is  modified  the  develop- 
ment of  woman  will  be  greater  and 
speedier ;  when  a  work  is  judged  as  a 
work  and  not  as  a  woman's  work  a  truer 
appreciation  must  follow.  At  present 
women  appear  before  the  jury  of  public 
opinion  under  a  disability;  the  treatment 
afforded  them  is  as  unjust  and  as  burlesque 
as  would  be  the  treatment  of  an  alleged 
murderer  whose  guilt  or  innocence  was  to 
some  extent  adjudicated  upon  according 
to  his  political  convictions.  Tentatively  I 
submit  also  that  tradition  comes  into  play. 
For  thousands  of  years  it  has  been  un- 
thinkable, or  "  not  quite  nice  "  that  women 
should  study  aught  save  the  minor  arts, 
that  they  should  attempt  to  create,  or 
appear  in  public  roles,  or  dissect  the  human 
body.  Moliere  asserted  an  old  opinion 
when  he  caused  Chrysale  to  say : 

"  II  n'est  pas  bien  bonnete,  et  pour  beaucoup  de  causes, 
Qu'une  femme  etudie  et  sache  tant  de  choses." 

This  has  weighed  heavily  upon  women ;  they 

have    doubted   themselves   because   every- 

43 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

body  doubted  them  ;  they  have  been  afraid 
to  speak  their  thoughts,  even  to  write  them 
in  journals  ;  sometimes  they  have  refrained 
from  doing  their   best  work   because   they 
were  afraid,  and  these   were  not  the  least 
delicate   talents.     It   is   said    that   one   of 
the  most  remarkable  novels  written  by  a 
woman  remained  unpublished  for  a  number 
of  years  because  the  husband  disapproved 
of    it.     It    is   this   tradition   has   confined 
woman  and  made  her  small ;  I  believe  that 
the  development  inherent  to  the  exercise  of 
her  political  rights  will  increase  her  stature. 
Upon  this  greatness  will  follow  a  more 
intelligent  public  spirit.     I  have  said  above 
that  women  are  avaricious  politicians  and 
have  no  use  for  charity  unless  it  begins  at 
home.     This  is    not    to    be  wondered   at 
when  we  examine  their  financial  past.     For 
thousands    of   years   they   have   been   the 
slaves  of  their  masters'  purse;    they  have 
either    been   kept    as    pampered    animals, 
devoid  of  money,  or  money  has  been  doled 
out    to    them    parsimoniously   for   specific 
objects.    Generally  speaking,  they  have  had 
no  financial  training,  they  have  never  handled 
44 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

large  sums,  they  have  had  to  practise 
continual  small  economies  so  as  to  defray 
the  cost  of  their  modest  pleasures,  and  they 
have  never  earned  much  more  than  a  bare 
living.  It  is  not  wonderful  then  that 
women's  monetary  views  have  become 
petty,  that  the  idea  of  spending  money 
should  terrify  them.  Apart  from  those 
who  are  reckless  and  foolish  because  their 
masters  have  made  them  beloved  slaves, 
they  cannot  bring  themselves  to  spend ; 
men  have  made  them  either  incompetent 
or  irresponsible.  Feminists  believe  that  if 
responsibility  is  thrust  upon  woman  she 
will  rise  to  and  become  worthy  of  her 
opportunity,  that  her  opportunity  will  grow 
as  her  capacity  grows.  She  is  to-day  like 
a  child  afraid  to  open  its  money-box; 
political  education  will  enable  her  to  see 
what  it  means  and  how  it  should  be 
used.  She  must  become  used  to  estimates, 
budgets,  credits,  understand  rating,  taxa- 
tion, debt  redemption,  take  in  something 
of  the  distribution  of  fortunes  and  of  the 
incidence  of  financial  measures.  All  this 
is  the  fruit  of  political  education.  The  idea 
45 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

of  national  finance  which  she  will  obtain 
may  be  hazy,  for  the  men  are  not  very 
clear  on  the  subject,  but  it  is  likely  to  be 
enough.  Though  men  are  not  all  capable 
of  analysing  the  Appropriation  Bill  they 
are  able  to  understand  that  the  taxes  are 
rightly  charged  and  necessary,  that  they 
are  devoted  to  useful  purposes ;  they  do 
not  so  readily  break  out  into  denunciations, 
cry  out  "  spoliation  "  and  "  robbery  "  as  do 
the  hysterical  and  untaught  women.  If 
they  occasionally  utter  these  cries  it  is 
merely  at  the  behest  of  their  political 
bosses  ;  soon  they  acquiesce  as  they  under- 
stand the  necessity  of  the  taxes.  Feminists 
believe  that  women  need  no  more  than 
experience  of  affairs  to  bring  them  to  the 
same  point. 

A  knowledge  of  affairs  will  automatically 
cool  the  passion  with  which  woman  ap- 
proaches politics,  but  not,  I  think,  com- 
pletely, and  it  would  be  a  loss  for  the  State 
if  it  did.  I  believe  that  we  need  passion  in 
politics,  the  hot  and  somewhat  unreasoning 
sense  of  right  and  wrong  which  so  often 
bears  down  the  sense  of  the  advisable  ;  it 
46 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

was  not  surprising  that  Sir  Henry  Campbell- 
Bannerman  cried  out  "  Enough  of  this 
foolery  "  at  the  play  of  politics.  Take  an 
instance :  the  coal-miners  struck  and  laid 
down  as  terms  a  minimum  wage  of  five 
shillings  a  day.  The  principle  was  agreed 
to,  the  amount  referred  to  arbitration. 
Now  some  of  the  arbitrators  gave  awards 
exceeding  five  shillings,  but  Lord  St.  Aldwyn 
granted  the  South  Wales  miners  no  more 
than  four  shillings  and  threepence  to  four 
shillings  and  ninepence.  Beyond  contest 
it  was  an  honest  award,  made  after  full 
consideration,  but  it  was  a  dry,  unsym- 
pathetic award ;  it  left  in  the  minds  of  the 
men  a  bad  impression  ;  they  thought  them- 
selves swindled  by  the  masters  and  by 
Parliament  who  had  "  sympathised  "  with 
them ;  it  was  impolitic  and  ungenerous, 
briefly,  devoid  of  passion.  Five  shillings 
could  have  been  granted  without  affecting 
the  price  of  coal,  for  it  is  notorious  that 
the  selling  price  has  nothing  to  do  with  the 
cost  of  extraction,  that  the  trade  is  in  the 
hands  of  a  ring  of  merchants,  that  in 
ordinary  years  house-coal  costs  eighteen 
47 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

shillings  a  ton  in  the  summer  and  twenty- 
seven  shillings  in  the  winter,  that  it  costs 
just  so  much  as  the  coal-ring  can  compel 
the  demand  to  bear.  One  flash  of  passion 
would  have  illumined  the  darkness  of  the 
arbitrator,  made  him  say  :  "  Five  shillings 
does  not  look  like  business,  but  it  does  look 
like  generosity."  And  then  there  would 
have  been  no  bitterness. 

I  do  not  contend  that  if  women  had  been 
voters  at  the  time,  Lord  St.  Aldwyn  would 
have  granted  the  men  five  shillings,  but 
I  do  think  that  the  passion  in  educated 
women  will  react  so  healthily  upon  public 
opinion  as  to  make  strict  but  mean  legality 
less  common.  I  think  that  from  women 
will  run  a  current,  sentimental  perhaps,  but 
beneficent,  a  current  carrying  within  itself 
a  new  generosity.  In  spite  of  the  meanness 
in  which  women  have  been  compelled  to 
live  they  are  still  more  active  in  religious 
and  charitable  affairs  than  are  the  men ;  it 
is  they  do  the  office  drudgery,  the  weary 
canvassing  and  the  humiliating  collection 
of  money  for  the  benighted  and  the  poor. 
I  do  not  defend  the  movements  they 
48 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

support:  they  are  mostly  futile  and  ex- 
pensive, they  divert  to  the  happy  savage 
energy  we  need  in  our  own  country,  they 
are  tainted  with  religious  fanaticism.  But 
I  am  not  concerned  so  much  with  woman 
as  with  potential  woman,  and  I  believe  that 
the  enlightened  public  spirit  which  must 
follow  on  the  granting  of  the  vote  will 
greatly  benefit  by  this  passion  of  religion, 
Empire  and  charity.  I  do  not  care  how 
much  evil  women  may  work,  for  I  am 
assured  that  the  power  that  works  evil  can 
also  work  good.  Fanaticism  can  be  de- 
flected, new  shibboleths  taught,  and  the 
believers  be  converted  to  other  gospels. 

I  believe  as  a  Feminist  that  this  immense 
reservoir  of  intensity  contains  a  force  of 
which  we  are  but  dimly  aware.  I  imagine 
that  once  women  have  fully  realised  the 
influence  of  housing  upon  physique  and 
mentality,  the  relation  that  exists  between 
the  feeding  of  children  and  their  education, 
the  effects  of  communal  control  on  mines, 
transit  and  milk-supply,  they  will  throw 
into  these  causes,  which  men  discuss  too 
coldly,  a  little  of  their  fierce,  race-protecting 
49 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

passion.  For  it  is  women,  and  not  men, 
who  care  for  the  race  ;  men  care  for 
achievement,  for  immediate  improvement, 
and  in  this  way  they  do  help  the  race ;  but 
women  look  further,  quite  unconsciously ; 
they  see,  beyond  their  unborn  son,  the 
endless  procession  he  and  his  sons  will 
beget.  But  that  is  a  cloudy  vision,  a  vision 
swathed  in  the  wrappings  of  times  long  dead ; 
women  can  conceive  the  race,  but  not  yet 
the  new  race,  with  new  standards,  new 
desires,  and  a  strange  freedom  from  the  old 
thralls.  As  a  Feminist  I  want  to  use  that 
intuitive  faculty,  to  make  of  woman  the 
conscious  seer  who  will  work  for  these 
children  of  the  mist. 

Militancy  demonstrates  the  existence  of 
this  passion.  For  six  years  now  women 
have  been  throwing  stones,  breaking 
windows,  firing  pillar  boxes  and  mobbing 
ministers  and  members  of  Parliament; 
they  have  repeatedly  submitted  to  arrest, 
and  have  cheerfully  returned  to  the  charge, 
knowing  that  they  would  again  be  subjected 
to  imprisonment,  assault,  forcible  feeding 
and  insult.  They  have  persevered,  and 
5° 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

many  have  shown  a  heroic  quality  akin  to 
insanity :  the  dividing  line  is  very  thin.  I 
do  not  want  to  judge  them,  to  discuss 
whether  Militancy  has  defeated  its  object ; 
I  do  not  think  so,  but  as  a  Feminist  I  am 
bound  to  look  further  ahead.  What  matters 
to  us  is  the  fanatical  quality,  and  we  do 
not  care  whether  opponents  attach  to  it 
the  word  "  insane  "  or  "  hysterical  "  : 
few  reforming  movements  have  come  into 
their  own,  and  few  great  deeds  have  been 
done,  save  by  those  whom  Dr.  Nordau 
and  others  call  degenerates,*  madmen, 
urnings,  hysterical  persons.  If  sanity  means 
"  average  person,"  and  I  believe  it  does,  we 
can  bear  with  the  lunatic  fire  of  Napoleon, 
Nietzsche,  Savonarola,  Newton  and  Galileo. 
If  this  lunacy  be  genius,  then  we  can  rely 
upon  woman  as  the  depositary  of  the  genius 
of  the  race;  her  unflinching  physical  courage, 
her  yet  greater  moral  courage  in  the  face  of 
gibes,  the  ferocity  of  spirit  which  dominates 
her  weakness  of  body,  all  these  traits  make 
me  believe  that  it  is  the  passion  of  woman 
shall  be  the  passion  of  the  State. 

*  See  "  Degeneration,"  by  Dr.  Max  Nordau. 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

The  Feminist  attitude  towards  woman's 
suffrage  is  therefore  one  of  expectancy. 
We  support  the  Suffragist  movement, 
whatever  be  its  demands,  its  aims  or  its 
methods,  because  we  consider  that  the 
framing  of  any  demand,  the  conception  of 
any  aim  and  the  practice  of  any  method 
are  evidences  of  the  revolt  of  woman  which 
we  desire  to  engineer.  Believing  in  the  sex- 
war  that  precedes  sex-peace  we  are  friendly 
to  every  form  of  sex-aggression ;  we  do 
not  care  very  much  whether  the  material 
fruits  of  Suffragism  fall  into  the  hands  of 
the  Suffragists,  but  we  do  want  to  see  them 
extend  their  hands  towards  the  forbidden 
branches,  for  desire  is  the  mother  of  action. 
We  expect  our  own  movement  to  benefit 
by  the  success  of  the  Suffragists,  for  we 
think  to  draw  from  among  the  Suffragists 
the  forces  which  will  be  unemployed  when 
they  have  attained  their  object.  Feminism 
is  to  Suffragism  what  Socialism  is  to  Trade 
Unionism ;  nominally  free  from  each  other 
the  two  movements  are  essentially  insepar- 
able. If  Feminism  aims  at  a  clearer  con- 
sciousness of  objects,  at  a  longer  vision,  it 
52 


FEMINISM   AND   SUFFRAGISM 

does  not  for  that  reason  despise  Suffragism, 
which  so  bravely  bears  the  rough  and 
tumble  of  action  ;  indeed  it  is  glad  when  a 
Suffragist  is  also  a  Feminist,  sets  upon 
activity  the  crown  of  thought  and  is  con- 
sciously a  Talleyrand  as  well  as  a  Murat. 


Ill 

THE   HOME 


Ill 

THE   HOME 


THE  home  is  the  enemy  of  woman. 
Purporting  to  be  her  protector  it 
is  her  oppressor ;  it  is  her  fortress, 
but  she  does  not  live  in  the  state  apart- 
ments, she  lives  in  the  dungeon.  In  modern 
life  the  home,  however  gaily-decked,  is  for 
her  but  a  glorification  of  the  basement 
where  live  the  slaves  of  slaves.  I  do  not 
think  that  there  is  a  more  powerful  enemy 
of  Feminism  than  the  home,  an  atmosphere 
more  deadly  to  all  ideas  of  freedom  and 
equality  than  the  rarefied,  holy  air  of  the 
fireside.  I  speak,  of  course,  of  the  home 
as  it  is  to-day  ;  and  I  waste  no  thunder  on 
bricks  and  mortar,  dogs  and  drawing-room 
fenders ;  those  things,  which  we  need  or 
choose  to  have,  are  the  representatives  of 
a  system  which  must  be  attacked  through 
57  * 


WOMAN   AND  TO-MORROW 

them,  and  with  it  they  must  probably  go, 
to  reappear  in  civilised  forms. 

It  is  not  that  I  imagine  a  society  of  units, 
where  men  and  women  live  separate  lives, 
but  a  society  of  voluntary  organisation,  an 
orderly  anarchic  society,  when  the  sexes  no 
more  exact  service  from  each  other  than  do 
the  individuals.  They  may  give  service,  as 
I  shall  show,  but  they  must  not  be  compelled 
to  give  it :  I  submit  that,  under  present 
social  conditions,  a  system  of  slavery  makes 
use  of  woman  for  the  procuring  of  man's 
comfort.  Consider  indeed  the  home  as 
we  know  it,  and  whether  it  be  run  on  a 
pound  a  week  or  on  a  thousand  a  year 
its  characteristics  do  not  vary  much.  I 
advisedly  exclude  the  very  wealthy,  though 
the  slavery  of  woman  is  not  unknown 
among  them  ;  in  the  home  of  a  magnate 
the  woman  can  relieve  herself  of  most  of 
her  cares  on  the  shoulders  of  other  women; 
she  is  no  longer  a  servant,  but  a  manager, 
but  it  may  well  be  that  even  in  those 
homes  she  staggers  under  the  weight  of 
social  organisation.  Yet,  as  she  is  very 
well  paid,  we  need  not  waste  general 
58 


THE   HOME 


sympathy  on  her ;  as  Feminists  we  may 
say  that  a  millionaire's  wife  has  a  lower 
status  than  has  a  working  woman,  for  she 
is  not  even  a  junior  partner,  but  she  does 
not  run  a  home  in  the  strict  sense  of  the 
word  :  she  runs  a  hotel. 

The  problem  of  the  very  rich  woman  will 
solve  itself  with  that  of  the  very  rich  man. 
Both  are  so  luxury-drugged,  so  impover- 
ished intellectually  that  we  must  look  upon 
them  as  monstrous  and  accidental  facts. 
Nowhere  are  women  so  low  as  among  the 
very  rich,  and  we  must  not  be  dazzled  by 
their  social  or  political  activities :  that  is 
what  they  are  paid  for.  They  are  as  low 
in  the  scale  as  their  domestic  servants,  for 
they  have  the  arrogance,  while  the  others 
have  the  humility  ;  as  arrogance  and  humi- 
lity are  the  foes  of  social  progress  it  is 
not  surprising  to  find  banded  together  in 
political  action  the  Duchess  and  her  cook. 
It  is  not,  therefore,  upon  the  social  fungus 
of  the  luxurious  home  I  wish  to  base  argu- 
ments ;  when  the  march  of  time  has  brought 
into  being  fortunes  which  will  dwarf  that 
of  Rockefeller,  when  the  middle-class  has 
59 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

been  crushed  out  and  when  at  last  labour 
begins  to  break  down  the  vast  fortunes,  the 
wealthy  home  will  slowly  disappear  and  the 
woman  who  runs  it  will  be  subject  to  the 
same  laws,  follow  the  same  evolution,  as 
the  woman  who  to-day  runs  an  average 
home. 

The  primary  characteristic  of  the  home 
as  I  understand  it,  from  the  workman's  two 
rooms  to  the  thousand-pounder's  house 
(and  this  can  stretch  to  another  thousand 
pounds),  is  its  sacredness.  The  Teutonic 
peoples,  who  have  manufactured  the  word 
"  home,"  are  specially  proud  of  it,  but  they 
have  no  monopoly  in  its  spirit ;  though 
Latins,  Slavs  and  Mongols  talk  less  about 
the  home  they  are  not  free  from  its  influence. 
Indeed,  and  this  is  curious,  it  is  perhaps 
because  the  Anglo-Saxons  feel  the  home  as 
more  sacred  than  do,  for  instance,  the  Latins, 
that  British  and  American  homes  are  freer, 
more  liberal  than  those  of  othernations.  The 
Anglo-Saxon  so  deeply  respects  his  home 
that  he  can  hardly  conceive  of  its  not  being 
respected  by  other  people  ;  it  is  he  invented 
"  An  Englishman's  Home  is  his  Castle," 
60 


THE   HOME 


and  wrote  "  Home,  Sweet  Home  "  ;  it  is  he 
discovered  that  "woman's  place  is  in  the 
home."  Why  this  is  I  cannot  say  ;  it  may 
be  that  the  cold  climate  of  Teuton  and 
Scandinavian  countries  made  of  the  home 
the  place  of  refuge  which  the  Latins  did 
not  need ;  it  may  be  that  if  the  latter 
looked  upon  the  home  as  a  sleeping-place 
merely,  it  is  because  the  conditions  of  their 
countries  were  agreeable.  All  this  is 
hypothesis  ;  it  is  hypothesis  too  to  suggest 
that  the  ferocity  of  defence  prevalent 
among  Latins  and  others  is  due  to  the 
home  being  the  abode  of  domestic  lust,  that 
they  defend  the  home  in  the  same  spirit  as 
the  Arab  defends  his  harem.  Those  con- 
siderations are  not  unworthy,  but  origins 
do  not  trouble  Feminists  much ;  their 
concern  is  not  with  the  past,  but  with  the 
present  and  the  future.  In  this  essay,  it  is 
with  the  sacredness  of  the  home. 

By  "  sacred  "  I  mean  a  mixed  feeling, 
implanted  deep  in  most  men,  that  their 
home  is  intangibly  different  from  and 
superior  to  that  of  most  other  men.  How- 
ever ill-managed  and  uncomfortable  it  has 
61 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

for  man  a  quality  that  is  not  to  be  found 
in  a  luxurious  hotel ;  if  a  poor  thing  it  is 
his  own,  and  he  is  as  unready  to  recognise 
it  as  bad  as  he  is  unwilling  to  pronounce 
his  dog  a  mongrel,  his  son  a  booby  or  his 
wife  a  jade.  Home,  dog,  son,  wife,  all 
these  properties  are  sanctified  by  his  enor- 
mous egotism  ;  they  are  either  flawless  or 
as  good  as  can  be  expected  ;  at  most,  man 
allows  it  to  be  felt,  if  he  be  in  humble 
mood,  that  "  his  home  may  not  be  much 
but  it's  as  good  as  anybody  else's."  He 
will  seldom  express  this  opinion,  he  is  too 
shy  or  too  inarticulate,  but  he  pays  con- 
tinual tribute  to  the  domestic  god  by 
returning  to  it  whenever  he  can,  boasting 
of  it  in  a  non-comparative  spirit,  decking  it 
and  those  who  serve  it.  To  be  invited  into 
the  home  is  an  honour  and  a  favour ;  the 
invitation  confers  privileges  but  it  imposes 
obligation  :  the  guest  may  not  brawl,  or 
contradict,  or  behave  as  freely  as  he  might 
in  a  club ;  he  may  not  sit  in  unbecoming 
attitudes,  he  must  make  himself  agreeable 
to  other  guests  even  if  he  dislikes  them,  he 
must  not  pry  into  secrets,  and  if  he  discover 
62 


THE   HOME 


any  by  chance  he  is  bound  in  honour  not 
to  reveal  them.  When  man  says  of  a 
guest  that  he  has  broken  his  bread  and 
eaten  his  salt  he  has  expressed  the  sacra- 
mental feeling  that  is  in  him,  inferred  that 
the  guest  must  treat  the  home  very  much 
as  if  it  were  a  church. 

That  it  is  a  church  is  evidenced  by  the 
hullabaloo  that  is  raised  when  a  legal  enact- 
ment threatens  the  home  and  its  humble 
subsidiary,  the  club.  Man  considers  that 
"  the  sanctity  of  the  home  is  violated " 
when  the  authorities  propose  to  inspect  his 
drains,  to  ascertain  whether  his  servants 
are  insured;  he  dislikes  the  idea  that 
strangers  may  be  admitted  into  it ;  if  he 
could  he  would  do  without  servants  and 
exclude  the  official  who  checks  the  gas- 
meter.  The  home,  he  feels,  would  be  the 
better  for  a  kind  of  Habeas  Corpus  Act. 
That  is  the  ideal ;  man  dislikes  departures 
therefrom,  tolerates  them  when  he  must : 
but  he  does  not  tolerate  anything  that  he 
need  not,  and  one  of  them  is  that  it  should 
be  neglected  or  refused  proper  worship  by 
woman,  its  queen  and  its  slave.  So  far  as 
63 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

woman  is  concerned  she  must  do  more 
than  worship,  she  must  serve;  the  man 
must  pay,  and  I  do  not  refuse  him  his  due : 
he  will  usually  sacrifice  his  time,  his  health 
and  his  pleasure  to  maintain  his  home,  but 
he  will  not  labour  within  it.  His  labour 
takes  him  far  afield,  to  the  society  of  his 
fellows,  to  monetary  adventure ;  so  far  as 
home-labour  is  concerned  he  generally 
contracts-out. 

The  woman  cannot  contract-out.  If 
she  be  a  working  woman  her  life  is  spent  in 
an  effort  to  keep  the  home  clean,  to  feed 
and  clothe  and  school  the  children,  to 
promote  peace,  so  that  the  man  may,  after 
the  oppression  of  the  day's  work,  luxuriate 
in  domestic  tyranny.  Observe  the  dis- 
tinction :  while  man  exchanges  the  oppres- 
sion of  the  day  for  the  tyranny  of  the 
evening,  woman  knows  no  such  compensa- 
tion ;  she  cannot  "  pass  on  "  the  thrall,  for 
there  is  nobody  to  pass  it  on  to.  She  has 
not  even  a  servant,  and  if  she  had  her 
tyranny  would  be  exercised  over  a  woman, 
which  would  be  quite  as  bad  from  the 
Feminist  point  of  view.  Her  position 
64 


THE   HOME 


recalls  that  of  the  donkey  in  Algeria :  The 
official  hits  the  soldier,  who  hits  the  settler, 
who  hits  the  Arab,  who  hits  the  nigger,  who 
hits  the  Jew,  who  hits  the  donkey.  Woman 
is  the  donkey  of  the  play.  The  well-to-do 
woman  is  in  very  much  the  same  position ; 
she  must  please  and  placate  ;  if  she  does 
not  work  with  her  own  hands  she  must  see 
to  it  that  the  work  is  done ;  she  must 
devote  her  energy  and  her  brain  to  the 
sweeping  and  garnishing  of  the  six  to 
twelve  rooms  she  is  blessed  with,  to  the 
careful  ordering  of  meals,  to  the  education 
and  upbringing  of  her  children,  to  the 
pursuit  of  economy.  She  is  paid,  in  kind, 
under  a  truck  system,  sometimes  much  too 
well,  usually  not  well  enough  ;  as  a  rule 
she  is  badly  paid  because  the  harsh  task- 
master of  her  conscience  is  set  over  her  to 
say  that  she  is  being  selfish  when  she  uses 
money  for  her  own  pleasure  ;  for  it  is  not 
her  money :  she  is  merely  an  administrator. 
Leaving  aside  for  the  moment  the 
question  whether  woman  should  work  at 
all,*  I  contend  that  she  should  work  in  a 
*  See  Chap.  v. 
65 


WOMAN   AND  TO-MORROW 

useful,  not  a  sterile  manner,  and  as  a 
Feminist  I  do  not  care  whether  she  is 
over-  or  underpaid  ;  it  is  the  spirit  of  the 
payment  and  the  nature  of  the  work  with 
which  I  have  quarrel.  I  contend  that 
her  work  is  mainly  sterile,  that  it  is  essen- 
tially humiliating,  that  no  special  treatment 
is  accorded  to  the  expert,  that  expert 
quality  is  not  recognised  ;  I  contend  too 
that  labour  in  the  home  steals  from  woman 
her  individuality,  her  originality,  her  oppor- 
tunities for  self-expression  and  self  develop- 
ment;  that  it  makes  her  stupid,  limited, 
harsh  (or  sentimental),  that  it  deprives  her 
of  her  beauty  and  her  grace,  divorces  her 
from  her  true  social  function  and  generally 
unfits  her  to  become  the  equal  companion 
whom  man  could  respect.  These  are 
formidable  charges  and  it  is  desirable  to 
examine  them  one  by  one  before  outlining, 
even  vaguely,  the  lines  of  reform  and  the 
probable  evolution  of  the  home. 

The  sterility  of  home-labour  is  the  result 

of  social  rather  than  of  conjugal  conditions, 

and  we  need  not  limit  its  reactions  to  the 

conjugal  relation,  for  it  taints  equally  the 

66 


THE   HOME 


labour  of  the  wife,  of  the  unmarried  daughter, 
of  the  relation  or  paid  person  who  under- 
takes it.  But  it  is  always  woman  suffers 
where  she  is  not  wholly  to  blame  ;  while 
the  man  escapes  all  responsibility  for  the 
home  except  that  of  paying  for  it,  a  respon- 
sibility which  is  not  on  the  whole  heavier 
than  he  chooses  to  make  it,  the  woman 
carries,  together  with  her  economic  cares, 
those  of  her  household  and  those  which  the 
man  chooses  to  impose  upon  her.  It  is 
within  the  power  of  the  paymaster  to 
compel  the  woman,  in  deference  to  his 
desire  for  state,  to  labour  with  her  hands 
on  the  upkeep  of  too  many  rooms,  to  over- 
see negligent  domestics,  to  provide  on  in- 
adequate resources  an  endless  succession 
of  ostentatious  entertainments.  It  is  with- 
in his  power  to  fill  her  brain  with  minor, 
but  disturbing  tasks.  I  am  the  last  to 
deny  that  woman  shares  the  responsibility 
for  showy  households ;  it  is  true  she  is 
often  a  snob,  binds  herself  upon  the  wheel, 
"  to  go  from  life  to  life,  from  despair  to 
despair."  Woman  has  the  cult  of  the 
pink  drawing-room. 

67 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

But  whether  the  home  be  simple  or 
ostentatious  the  result  is  generally  the 
same.  Woman  is  preoccupied  with  infinite 
small  cares,  and  it  does  not  much  matter 
what  they  are ;  most  of  them  are  sterile. 
She  supervises  complicated  cooking  arrange- 
ments, so  as  to  "  feed  the  brute " ;  she 
must  continually  concentrate  on  futilities, 
ask  herself:  "  Is  it  time  the  curtains  went 
to  the  cleaner's  ?  Have  I  stamped  the 
servants'  cards  ?  Do  I  pay  the  wages  to- 
day ?  "  Wages  !  Woman  has  sunk  so  low 
in  the  home  that,  when  she  is  a  domestic 
servant,  she  actually  refuses  to  receive  her 
wages  on  the  last  day  of  the  month  ;  she 
must  be  paid  from  the  day  on  which  she 
came.  I  will  return  further  on  to  the 
domestic  servant,  the  lowest  of  the  female 
types.  As  regards  the  futility  of  home- 
labour,  can  we  imagine  anything  more 
petty  to  occupy  a  human  mind  than  the 
memorising  or  noting  of  four  different 
pay-days  for  four  servants  ?  But  the 
housewife  has  other  preoccupations :  she 
must  remember  to  pay  the  bills,  some 
weekly,  some  monthly,  some  quarterly ; 
68 


THE  HOME 


she  must  note  that  the  days  of  grace  of  the 
insurance  policy  are  running  out,  that 
more  dallying  will  cause  the  borough  to 
distrain  for  rates.  She  must  feed  the  tele- 
phone-call account.  And  the  window-boxes 
need  replenishing.  And  the  servants  say 
the  dog  is  not  well ;  she  must  ring  up  the 
vet.  And  she  must  instruct  the  newsagent 
to  change  the  man's  newspaper.  And  she 
must  not  forget  that  penny  bottle  of  ink. 

A  full  half  of  woman's  time  is  absorbed 
by  these  domestic  complexities  ;  they  hang 
over  her  until  they  are  done  with,  by  which 
time  others  have  come  to  maturity.  She 
may  be  on  a  Care  Committee  and  busy 
with  social  work,  but  she  must  leave  it 
if  the  cook  says :  "  Please,  ma'am,  the 
butcher."  It  is  understating  the  truth  to 
say  that  half  a  woman's  time  is  thus 
employed :  if  she  could  compress  all  her 
cares  into  the  hours  that  separate  eight  in 
the  morning  and  two  in  the  afternoon  my 
case  would  not  be  so  strong.  But  many 
intrude  at  all  hours  of  the  day;  they  are 
always  pressing  upon  her,  demanding 
solution  in  odd  minutes  from  waking  to 
69 


WOMAN   AND  TO-MORROW 

sleep.  Every  care  disturbs  and  deflects 
her  from  other  pursuits  and  from  thought. 
If  the  social  position  of  the  hour  has  to 
be  maintained  there  are  a  series  of  dull 
calls,  there  are  appearances  (prefaced  by 
lengthy  dressing)  at  Ranelagh,  drawing-room 
meetings,  private  views.  And  there  are 
scientifically-planned  dinners,  complicated 
combinations  of  amusing  people  with  useful 
people ;  there  is  steering  among  the  shoals 
of  "who  dislikes  who";  there  is  correspond- 
ence, table-decorating,  menu-writing  ;  and 
there  are  At  Homes,  domestic  revolutions,  a 
hundred  envelopes  to  address.  It  goes  on 
for  ever  and  ever. 

The  great  mass  of  these  cares  is  pure 
futility.  The  individual,  separate  home  is 
intolerably  complicated  by  its  separateness ; 
all  this  work  of  private  cooking,  cleaning, 
decorating  should  be  communal.  The 
finance  of  the  home  should  be  centralised  ; 
it  should  be  in  the  hands  of  experts,  not  of 
the  toys  or  drudges  who  control  it  to-day. 
And  the  gross,  elaborate  system  of  entertain- 
ing, its  falsity,  its  vacuousness,  bound  up  in 
the  temperament  of  the  woman  of  our  day, 
70 


THE   HOME 


should  be  whittled  away  by  sumptuary  laws, 
by  the  pressure  of  taxes,  and  by  the  urging 
into  rebellion  of  the  women  whom  it 
exploits.  I  deal  with  the  home  under 
Feminism  at  the  end  of  this  essay ;  at 
present  my  point  is  that  this  multitude  of 
trifles,  spread  over  a  woman's  entire  life,  is  not 
comparable  with  the  business  details  which 
occupy  six  to  ten  hours  of  a  man's  time. 
Man  can  shake  from  him  his  office  or  his 
factory,  while  woman  continues  to  stagger 
under  the  weight  of  her  home.  That  is 
a  humiliating  position  of  itself;  it  is  a 
characteristic  of  slavery  that  the  subject  is 
never  free  from  his  thrall,  while  wage- 
slavery,  a  limited  form,  resides  in  a  loss  of 
freedom  for  part  of  his  time.  Most  men 
are  wage-slaves,  but  most  women  are  slaves 
pure  and  simple.  It  is  because  they  are 
slaves  that  nothing  is  thought  of  making 
them  labour  under  a  truck  system,  at  any 
and  all  hours,  of  loading  them  with  such 
work  as  men  consider  unworthy,  disgusting 
or  painful.  It  is  women  run  the  household 
errands,  clean  the  steps,  and  perform  all  the 
menial  tasks*  And  women  have  been  so 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

well  trained  by  their  masters  that  they 
believe  it  is  well  so,  that  these  things  are 
not  "  man's  work "  ;  they  think  better  of 
him  for  his  tyranny ;  they  are  uneasy  if  he 
is  domesticated,  not  sure  that  he  is  quite  a 
man.  And  they  stand  respectful  when  he 
drives  a  nail,  believe  that  they  can't  drive 
nails,  just  as  they  believe  that  they  can't 
laugh  over  Pwich. 

This  condition  would  not  prevail  if  the 
home-labourer  were  recognised  as  an  expert, 
or  if  an  expert  were  employed ;  already 
some  experts  have  established  themselves, 
such  as  the  cook,  the  nurse,  and  the 
governess,  but  the  housewife,  who  controls 
them  all,  is  supposed  to  do  so  by  virtue  of 
some  natural  faculty;  she  gains  little  credit 
therefor,  and  when  a  man  says  that "  Maud 
runs  the  house  very  well,"  I  believe  he 
means  that  the  house  runs  itself  very  well, 
including  Maud.  Having  loaded  on  the 
woman  an  absurdly  complicated  business 
he  looks  upon  her  as  a  figure-head,  dully 
supposes  that  "  one  must  have  a  wife," 
much  as  some  Royalists  say :  "  One  must 
have  a  king."  The  effect  of  this  feeling  is 
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that  woman  realises  that  she  is  not  ap- 
preciated, that  a  good  system  will  earn 
little  more  praise  than  a  bad  one,  "  slacks," 
becomes  pleasure-loving,  extravagant,  and 
therefore  degraded.  She  is  degraded  because 
she  is  given  lowly  work  and  allowed  to  do 
it  in  lowly  fashion.  I  do  not  believe  this 
will  endure  for  ever,  any  more  than  I  believe 
in  the  eternity  of  the  narrow,  hostile  little 
centre  where  the  family  drains  away  the 
mother's  energies.  Taking  conditions  as 
we  know  them,  however,  it  is  certain  that 
woman  suffers  in  the  esteem  of  man  because 
she  is  presumed  to  be  doing  minor  work : 
I  repeat  and  cannot  repeat  too  often  the 
Feminist  view,  namely,  that  we  are  not 
primarily  concerned  with  the  quality  of  the 
work,  but  with  the  result  of  the  work  on 
woman's  status.  We  object  to  low-class 
and  unnecessary  work,  and  we  think  most 
home-labour  useless ;  but  we  object  still 
more  to  the  attitude  of  man  towards 
woman  when  he  refuses  to  recognise  the 
housewife  as  practising  a  highly-skilled 
trade. 

The  material  effects  of  home-labour  upon 
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WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

woman  are,  according  to  her  means,  more 
or  less  serious,  but  they  are  all  bound  up 
in  the  inevitable  waste  of  her  youth,  her 
beauty,  and  her  grace.  They  are  most 
marked  among  the  working-classes  who, 
one  might  almost  say,  number  no  women 
of  thirty :  working  women  are  twenty,  then 
married,  then  forty.  A  few  years  of  mar- 
ried life,  of  child-bearing,  of  struggling  to 
run  the  household  on  fifteen  to  thirty  shil- 
lings a  week  or  on  a  trade-union  unemploy- 
ment benefit,  and  they  are  old.  They  are 
divorced  from  the  joyous  fripperies  of 
youth,  and  while  their  men  retain  their 
looks  they  become  ugly;  they  contract 
incurable  diseases  due  to  working  in  the 
home  while  pregnant,  varicose  veins ;  they 
lose  their  teeth  because  they  cannot 
afford  a  dentist.  All  this  is  the  tragedy  of 
poverty,  but  it  is  especially  the  tragedy  of 
labour  in  poor  houses,  where  work  is  multi- 
plied by  bad  organisation,  ill-taught  and 
ill-shared.  I  do  not  pretend  they  have  no 
pleasures,  for  they  have,  and  they  enjoy 
more  fully  the  trip  in  a  penny  steamer  than 
their  rich  sisters  do  Henley:  but  pleasure 
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is  naught  save  a  compensation ;  it  is  not  a 
cure  for  wasted  mental  tissue.  I  go  so  far 
as  to  say  that  even  the  well-to-do  cannot 
escape  the  physical  effects  of  home-labour. 
It  is  true  that  we  may  see  everywhere 
scores  of  well-dressed  and  cheerful  married 
women,  but  it  is  also  true  that  we  see  on 
the  faces  of  those  who  carry  on  complex 
establishments  and  have  large  families,  lines 
which  mean  preoccupation  and  compulsory 
activity,  lines  which  are  not  on  the  faces  of 
those  whose  establishments  and  families 
are  small. 

The  mental  results  of  home-labour  out- 
weigh the  physical  where  the  well-to-do  are 
concerned,  while  they  are  also  apparent  in 
the  working-classes ;  mentally,  therefore, 
women  of  all  classes  are  affected  much  in 
the  same  way.  Home-labour  costs  most 
of  them  their  individuality,  largely  because 
there  are  home  conventions.  They  are 
subtle,  soul-destroying  things,  these  con- 
ventions that  halls  should  be  red  or  blue, 
drawing-rooms  pink  or  white-and-gold ;  and 
when  they  change,  as  they  did  when  fumed 
oak  came,  and  Morris  chintz,  and  Jacobean 
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WOMAN    AND   TO-MORROW 

furniture,  they  are  as  levelling  and  as 
destructive.  The  conventions  go  further 
than  decoration :  they  prescribe  courses  at 
meals,  their  nature  and  their  order,  holi- 
days, their  locality  and  their  date,  and  the 
trappings  of  babies,  the  choice  of  flowers. 
They  deprive  women  of  the  need  to  inno- 
vate, without  depriving  them  of  the  need  to 
do  defined  things.  It  is  not  good  that 
woman  should  have  her  road  mapped  out 
by  custom,  for  it  leaves  her  with  an  im- 
mense amount  of  labour  to  perform  if  she 
is  to  follow  custom,  while  nothing  causes 
her  to  use  her  mind.  It  is  her  body,  not 
her  mind  is  racked,  or  rather  the  almost 
physical  side  of  her  mind,  the  side  which 
schemes  and  calculates  ;  the  creative  side 
is  neglected,  and  because  it  has  always 
been  neglected  it  has  become  atrophied. 

I  am  aware  that  a  number  of  well-to-do 
women  are  reacting  against  this  state  of 
things,  that  they  are  trying  new  decora- 
tion schemes,  new  food,  new  music,  new 
places,  labour-saving  appliances,  that  they 
are  breaking  the  ring.  That  is  a  Feminist 
movement,  and  it  proves  that  the  home  is 
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throttling  woman :  if  there  were  nothing  to 
react  against  women  would  not  be  reacting, 
for  there  are  no  revolutions  without  causes, 
without  grievances.  Women  are  strug- 
gling to  recover  their  buried  originality,  to 
express  themselves.  They  are  trying  to 
escape  from  the  softness  of  the  ready- 
made  home ;  they  know  that  the  gentler  it 
is  the  worse  it  is,  the  more  like  a  velvety 
prison.  It  is  evident  that  women  are  not 
naturally  lacking  in  originality ;  there  have 
been  too  many  brilliant  talkers  and  salon- 
makers,  too  many  pungent  writers  of 
memoirs,  to  make  it  possible  to  say  that 
they  cannot  follow  their  own  line.  In  the 
home  their  originality  has  been  restricted 
by  the  lack  of  originality  in  men ;  it  is 
not  women  who  invented  the  sentences 
"  French  kickshaws "  and  "  new-fangled 
notions,"  but  men,  and  especially  old  men, 
who  use  them  as  if  they  were  arguments. 
Women  are  more  experimental  than  their 
owners,  more  inclined  to  accept  new  ideas  ; 
indeed,  they  accept  them  too  easily,  with 
the  facility  that  reveals  intimate  boredom, 
unsatisfied  thirst  for  suspected  beauty. 
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WOMAN   AND  TO-MORROW 

Upon  their  loss  of  individuality  and  the 
limitation  of  their  originality  there  has 
naturally  followed  incapacity  to  express 
themselves.  It  must  not  be  thought  that 
because  women  are  voluble  they  are  saying 
what  they  mean  :  generally  they  can't  see 
the  words  for  the  vocabulary.  But  it  is  not 
in  words  only  that  woman  fails  to  express 
herself:  apart  from  artistic  expression  in 
concrete  works  she  has  learned  to  repress 
in  the  home  the  manifestations  of  her 
personality,  to  abstain  from  innovating 
because  the  owner  would  probably  dislike 
the  new  soup,  the  child's  fanciful  clothes. 
Thus  she  has  not  been  allowed  to  develop, 
for  she  could  develop  only  as  man  develops 
when  he  tries  a  new  machine  in  his  factory, 
a  card-index  in  his  office.  Home-labour 
has  been  made  a  trade,  but  an  unskilled 
trade  bound  by  obsolete  regulations.  While 
the  whole  face  of  industry  has  been  changed 
since  the  sixties,  the  home  is  very  much 
what  it  was  then:  the  telephone,  the 
carpet-sweeper,  and  the  bathroom  are 
purely  external.  To  expect  a  woman  to 
look  after  the  electric  light  is  exactly  the 


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same  as  to  expect  her  to  look  after  the 
lamps,  for  the  spirit  of  the  charge  has  not 
changed. 

It  is  not  wonderful  then  that  the  thrall 
should  have  made  women  stupid,  limited, 
and  alternately  sentimental  and  harsh : 
slavish  conditions  make  slaves.  It  is  not 
wonderful  that  by  being  told,  they  cannot 
understand  business  they  have  actually 
grown  to  believe  that  they  cannot  under- 
stand business.  When  a  woman  occasionally 
escapes  and  becomes  so  proficient  as  to 
know  how  to  manage  a  hotel,  nobody  is  so 
genuinely  impressed  as  her  unemancipated 
sisters.  If  they  are  sentimental  it  is  be- 
cause they  have  been  flooded  with  washy 
belief  in  domestic  sanctities,  with  com- 
pulsory religious  observances,  with  ready- 
made  opinions  on  divorce  and  legitimate 
children  ;  if  they  are  harsh  when  social  rules 
are  broken  (and  they  are  harsher  than  men) 
it  is  because  they  have  never  been  allowed 
to  do  more  than  keep  them,  because  such 
terrible  penalties  have  been  visited  on 
them  that  they  respect  them,  because  they 
have  never  been  taught  that  circumstances 
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WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

alter  cases,  and  they  therefore  ignore  circum- 
stances. Thus  Latin  women  are  as  a  rule 
willing  to  accept  as  right  that  a  man  may 
kill  his  unfaithful  wife,  while  they  often  take 
it  for  granted  that  a  man  may  be  as  loose 
as  he  chooses.  I  will  not  discuss  whether 
conjugal  infidelity  deserves  capital  punish- 
ment, for  that  is  irrelevant.  What  is  re- 
levant is  that  women,  having  been  taught 
by  man  that  the  two  sexes  are  in  a  different 
position,  believe  it.  Because  they  believe 
it  they  are  the  first  to  ostracise  the  divorced 
woman,  to  turn  out  their  seduced  house- 
maid. Brutality  has  made  them  brutal. 

A  word,  in  passing,  on  the  domestic 
servant.  I  have  ventured,  earlier  in  this 
essay,  to  dub  her  one  of  the  lowest  female 
types,  and  I  think  myself  justified  when 
considering  her  defects  and  some  of  her 
so-called  qualities.  Though  many  well-to- 
do  women  rail  at  their  servants  it  will  be 
agreed  that,  given  their  opportunities  for 
stealing  with  impunity,  they  are  wonder- 
fully honest.  In  the  main  they  are  truth- 
ful, conscientious  and  hard-working ;  they 
have  most  of  the  qualities  with  which  their 
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mistresses  can  afford  to  dispense.  These 
are  unobjectionable  traits,  but  domestic 
servants  can  well  be  called  low,  because 
they  have  lost,  or  rather  sold,  the  quality 
of  independence.  They  are  voluntary  slaves : 
they  think  it  right  that  they  should  serve 
while  others  receive  service  ;  they  are  not 
quite  sure  that  a  woman  is  "  a  real  lady  " 
if  she  works  with  her  brain  ;  they  are  as 
rude  as  they  dare  be  if  she  works  with  her 
hands  ;  they  respect  idleness,  and  they 
also  respect  waste,  for  they  will  seldom 
object  to  the  labour  entailed  upon  them  by 
entertaining :  it  raises  the  tone  of  the 
house. 

The  attitude  of  servants  is  still  that  of 
the  footmen  who  dined  Sam  Weller  on  a 
"  swarry "  of  boiled  mutton  and  assumed 
their  masters'  names.  The  servants  carry 
from  one  house  to  another  the  contaminat- 
ing home  convention  ;  they  teach  (with  a 
sniff)  the  eight-hundred-a-year  household 
how  things  were  done  in  their  previous 
twelve-hundred-pound  place.  They  think 
it  normal  that  their  masters  should  have 
a  call  on  them  for  twenty-four  hours  a  day, 
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WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

accord  them  no  liberty  save  one  evening  a 
week  and,  every  alternate  week,  half  a 
Sunday.  And,  while  they  envy  her  a  little, 
they  feel  more  genteel  than  the  shop-girl. 
They  prize  their  intercourse  with  the  rich, 
they  gladly  sell  their  chance  of  freedom  for 
security,  food,  and  presents  of  cast-off 
clothes.  They  are  afraid  of  adventure, 
afraid  of  life.  Their  gentility  places  them 
well  below  the  brave  women  who  will  not 
bend,  shop-girls,  waitresses,  teachers,  nurses 
who  bear  wage-slavery,  bad  food,  long 
hours,  abominable  lodgings  and  loneliness, 
rather  than  enter  the  gilded  cages  of 
Kensington. 

The  domestic  servant  is  a  typical  product 
of  the  home.  She  has  been  maintained  in 
slavery,  for  centuries  insulted,  but  recently 
freed  from  corporal  punishment ;  she  has 
been  taught  that  her  laws  are  the  master's 
voice  and  that  of  his  deputy;  the  "char- 
acter "  system  has  delivered  her  into  un- 
gentle hands,  which  do  not  hesitate  to  visit 
revenge  upon  her  when  she  rebels  against 
feminine  oppression  and  masculine  pursuit. 
It  may  be  argued  that  I  paint  the  case  too 
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black,  but  the  reader  must  divorce  his  mind 
from  the  luxurious  establishment  where 
there  are  half  a  dozen  maids,  turn  awhile 
to  the  lodging-house  and  to  the  myriads  of 
households  where  one  little  girl  of  fourteen 
(it  might  be  ten  but  for  the  Education 
Acts)  ministers  for  sixteen  hours  a  day  to 
the  needs  of  two  adults  and  several  children. 
In  those  homes  the  servant  becomes  a 
beast  of  burden ;  in  the  luxurious  homes 
she  becomes  a  pampered  beast.  In  none 
does  she  become  a  woman. 

It  is  not  surprising,  if  my  picture  of  the 
home  and  its  inmates  be  accepted  as  fair, 
that  I  should  ask  for  drastic  reform.  As  a 
Feminist  I  lay  greater  stress  upon  mental 
than  physical  evils,  and  it  is  with  the  latter 
I  wish  to  do  away.  In  the  first  place  the 
little  private  home  must  go.  It  is  going, 
as  is  shown  by  the  increase  of  flats  and 
workmen's  dwellings,  but  even  in  these  the 
old  traditions  are  being  maintained  except 
in  a  few  places,  where  service  is  supplied. 
The  ideal  system  is  indicated  by  the 
"Chambers  for  Gentlemen"  in  Piccadilly 
and  Jermyn  Street;  I  conceive  the  Feminist 
83 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

home  as  much  smaller  than  the  average 
house,  for  I  doubt  the  usefulness  of  certain 
rooms.  The  average  house,  tenanted  by  a 
family  of  four  and  their  three  servants, 
comprises  a  three-roomed  and  be-corridored 
basement,  a  dining-room,  behind  which  is 
another  room,  a  drawing-room  (sometimes 
sub-divided  into  two  rooms),  offices  and 
five  bedrooms. 

Two  bedrooms,  or  one  room  and  a 
dressing-room,  are  occupied  by  the  masters ; 
one  bedroom  is  occupied  by  two  servants  ; 
two  rooms  become  nurseries  and  house  the 
third  servant.  There  is  little  to  object  to 
in  this  arrangement  except  that,  when  the 
masters  elect  to  share  a  bedroom,  the 
dressing-room  is  superfluous.  The  room 
behind  the  dining-room  is  totally  useless ; 
it  is  generally  used  for  the  female  guests' 
wraps.  The  drawing-room  is  necessary  if 
it  be  used  as  a  living-room;  though  generally 
preserved  for  infrequent  social  strutting,  a 
living-room  is  wanted.  But  it  is  either  too 
large  if  it  occupy  the  whole  floor,  for  it  will 
be  recalled  that  the  children  are  allowed 
two  rooms,  or  if  it  occupy  nought  save  the 
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front  of  the  house,  the  back-room  is 
useless.  The  dining-room  is  useless:  there 
is  no  reason  why  we  should  not  eat  in 
common  as  do  millions  every  day  in  hotels, 
boarding-houses,  restaurants  and  cafes. 
The  basement  is  absolutely  useless  :  that  a 
street  of  a  hundred  houses  should  indulge 
in  a  hundred  kitchens,  a  hundred  sculleries 
and  a  hundred  pantries  is  ludicrous.  I  do 
away,  therefore,  with  six  rooms  out  of 
twelve ;  if  we  spare  one  room,  so  as  to  give 
the  two  sexes  a  chance  of  privacy,  and 
allow  one  room  for  the  servants'  living- 
room,  the  economy  appears  as  thirty- three 
per  cent.  It  is  an  enormous  economy,  when 
we  consider  that  all  these  rooms  must  be 
cleaned;  it  is  probably  greater  than  it 
appears,  for  I  doubt  whether  a  household 
would  need  three  servants,  when  freed 
from  the  cooking-range  by  common  cater- 
ing ;  moreover,  living-rooms  for  thirty 
servants  would  occupy  less  space  than  ten 
rooms,  each  of  which  accommodated 
three. 

I  am  content,  however,  with  this  economy 
of  space  and  labour  if  common  cooking  is 
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WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

conceded.  I  imagine  the  Feminist  home 
rather  as  a  large  block  of  flats  in  a  garden, 
over  a  common  restaurant ;  the  staff  is 
directed  by  an  elected  manageress  and  her 
deputy,  both  of  whom  work  no  more  than 
eight  hours  a  day ;  the  servants  work  eight 
hours  a  day ;  a  competent  kitchen  staff,  under 
a  well-paid  chef,  prepares  table  d'hote  meals 
for  the  lazy  and  a  lengthy  a  la  carte  bill  for 
the  fastidious.  Food,  wines,  tobacco  are 
bought  wholesale  and  co-operative  dividends 
are  paid  to  the  consumers  pro  rata  to  their 
consumption.  There  are,  because  they 
are  large,  cheap  coal  contracts;  there  is 
cheap,  unlimited  telephone  service,  cheap 
fire  insurance  for  the  whole  block,  and  all 
these  services  are  taken  off  the  mind  of  the 
inhabitants  by  the  salaried  staff;  the  private 
washer-woman  disappears.  There  are 
common  garages  for  motor-cars,  bicycles, 
perambulators  ;  these  no  longer  crowd  dark 
halls  or  occupy  valuable  space  in  mews  ; 
there  is  no  more  dragging  of  machinery  up 
the  front  steps.  Everything  that  can  be 
done  to  throw  the  business  of  the  household 
upon  a  salaried  staff  is  done. 
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I  have  no  idea  of  dimensions  ;  in  principle 
the  largest  possible  block  is  the  best, 
as  it  is  the  cheapest,  but  it  must  be 
reasonably  quiet.  There  is  a  practical 
limit  to  size,  as  there  is  in  clubs ;  a  forty  or 
fifty  flat  block  sounds  manageable  enough. 
The  scheme,  which  is  not  novel  but  yet 
worth  summarising,  is  open  to  criticism  but 
can  resist  it.  I  know  that  the  first  cry  is 
11  privacy  "  :  well,  I  do  not  want  to  destroy 
privacy  and  have  gone  so  far  as  to  accord 
one  room  each  for  man,  wife  and  child.  I 
merely  want  privacy  to  descend  from  the 
sacred  pedestal,  for  I  believe  that,  carried 
too  far,  the  desire  for  privacy  becomes 
hostility.  There  is  public  dining,  but  we 
already  dine  in  public.  There  is  the  idea 
of  the  personal  servant :  that  I  am  frankly 
against ;  I  want  to  do  away  entirely  with 
the  personal  servant,  to  call  in  the  maid  as 
I  call  in  the  plumber,  to  report  her  derelic- 
tions of  duty  to  my  elected  representative 
as  I  would  the  plumber  to  his  master.  I 
want  to  do  away  with  the  personal  relation 
because  it  is  the  relation  of  master  and 
slave ;  the  domestic  servant  must  be  an 
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WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

expert,*  and  must  be  treated  as  an  expert. 
She  will  be  a  better  servant,  and  she  will 
have  a  better  mistress,  for  she  will  no 
longer  be  a  slave,  the  mistress  no  longer  a 
tyrant.  I  believe  that  both  arrogance  and 
humility  are  bad,  subscribe  to  : 

"  La  Nature  n'afait  ni  serviteurs  ni  maitres, 
Je  ne  veux  ni  donner  ni  recevoir  de  lois." 

It  will  be  objected  also  that  I  destroy 
woman's  creative  opportunity,  which  is  best 
exercised  within  her  home:  that  is  a  worth- 
less argument,  for  she  will  still  have  the 
fullest  possible  scope  in  decoration ;  she 
will  be  freed  from  petty  tasks,  which  she 
does  not  always  perform  well,  and  given 
time  which  she  now  lacks  will  make  beauty 
in  her  reformed  home;  I  do  not  suggest 
that  she  must  be  forbidden  to  do  anything, 
but  I  do  suggest  that  she  must  not  be  made 
to  do  everything :  I  want  her  to  co-operate 
with  but  not  serve  the  man.  So  far  as 
the  creative  opportunity  of  to-day  goes  I 

*  See  "  What  Diantha  Did,"  by  Charlotte  Perkins 
Oilman.  (An  account  of  a  system  of  home  catering 
from  a  common  centre.) 

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will  leave  it  to  the  unprejudiced  to  say 
how  woman  has  taken  advantage  of  it  in  the 
basement. 

It  must  be  understood  that,  when  I 
suggest  a  flat  system,  I  am  not  thinking  of 
the  cramped,  dark,  ill-ventilated  groups 
of  little  rooms  which  London  calls 
"  mansions,"  where  servants  sleep  in  bunks 
and  the  coal  is  stored  under  the  bath ;  I 
think  rather  of  the  fine,  roomy  flats  of 
Paris,  Vienna  and  Berlin,  where  we  some- 
times find  rooms  equal  to  a  Grosvenor 
Square  drawing-room.  The  Feminist  flat 
is  revolutionary,  strikes  at  the  root  of  the 
economic  system,  may  involve  vast  read- 
justments of  land-tenure,  communal  build- 
ing and  taxation.  But  we  are  not  afraid  of 
revolution,  for  we  are  the  pioneers  of  a 
sex-revolution.  We  are  quite  willing  to 
break  eggs.  We  want  woman  to  be  free 
from  her  immense  administrative  cares,  to 
use  her  for  domestic  purposes  on  the  same 
footing  as  man  ;  we  do  not  suggest  that  we 
shall  hand  over  all  the  home-labour  to  man, 
for  he  is  not  likely  to  do  it  well,  but  we  do 
want  to  do  away  with  licensed  home 
89  G 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

slavery,  to  make  the  housewife,  when  poor, 
a  paid  expert,  when  rich  a  centre  of  culture. 
We  want  to  take  home-labour  from  the 
shoulders  of  the  working  woman,  to  give 
her  an  opportunity  for  rest,  to  preserve  her 
beauty  and  increase  her  public  interest ; 
thanks  to  the  results  of  women's  suffrage 
we  may  achieve  this,  for  we  shall  arouse 
woman.  It  would  be  a  fatal  thing  if  the 
economic  revolution  now  in  progress  were 
to  result  in  a  purely  andro-centric  world 
based  on  the  labour  of  an  enslaved  sex : 
Feminism  shall  stand  in  the  way. 

The  housewife  of  the  future  is  a  little 
more  shadowy  than  her  home,  for  we  do 
not  know  what  will  be  the  economic  con- 
ditions of  the  future.  If  they  tend  to  a 
community  where  none  wish  to  avoid 
labour,  I  visualise  her  as  a  highly  scientific 
home-worker,  fitted  for  certain  tasks,  paid 
a  time  or  a  piece  rate.  There  will  be  no 
truck  system ;  the  monetary  element  will 
vanish  from  marriage  (whatever  marriage 
may  then  be),  and  the  claim  of  the  home- 
worker  will  be  no  longer  on  the  master-man 
but  on  the  community.  I  see  her  then  as 
90 


THE    HOME 


wonderfully  free,  performing  the  maximum 
amount  of  labour  in  the  minimum  of  time,* 
drawing  her  rightful  and  personal  share  of 
commodities  from  the  voluntary  associa- 
tion, and  using  the  ample  remainder  of  her 
time  as  she  may  fancy ;  she  will  be  freed 
for  a  social  role,  for  self-culture,  for  the 
arts,  for  pleasure.  Woman's  share  of 
pleasure  is  not  great  to-day  among  those 
who  work;  we  want  pleasure  for  her,  so 
that  she  may  have  joy  of  life,  abundant, 
unfettered  pleasure — pleasure  as  a  natural 
consequence  of  life,  pleasure  as  a  right  and 
not  as  a  gift.  "  Beauty  and  Duty,"  that  is 
the  motto  of  the  Feminists. 


*  There  is  a  stage  beyond  this,  for  I  am,  in  the 
main,  of  opinion  that  woman  should  not  work.  See 
chap.  v. 


IV 
THE   ARTS 


IV 
THE   ARTS 


MAN  has,  for  a  long  time,  been 
given  to  asserting  that  woman 
has  no  artistic  capacity ;  he  has 
sometimes  asserted  it  plainly,  sometimes 
inferred  it:  the  judgments  of  Schopenhauer, 
Nietzsche,  Weininger,  the  cruder  views  of 
the  art-critics  who  insult  with  the  word 
"  masculine  "  the  artistic  works  of  woman, 
all  show  that  man  believes  art  to  be  sexual 
and  bound  up  within  his  own  sex.  He  is 
probably  not  wrong  in  considering  art 
sexual,  suggesting  that  there  is  no  art 
where  the  fountain  of  life  does  not  bubble, 
rush  forth  alternately  into  sensual  indul- 
gence and  into  self-expression.  Both  pro- 
cesses are  creative,  and  I  do  not  think  that 
I  am  stretching  truth  too  far  when  I  say 
that  the  instinct  by  favour  of  which  a  child 
95 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

is  created  is  the  same  in  principle  as  the 
one  which  brings  into  existence  a  picture 
or  a  book.  I  do  not  deny  the  qualifying 
fact  of  consciousness  ;  it  is  important  that 
the  artist  should  know  what  he  is  doing 
and  that  he  should  deliberately  do  it,  but 
the  qualification  does  not  absolutely  stand. 
It  is  not  demonstrated  that  consciousness 
is  more  than  important;  it  may  not  be 
essential :  consider  indeed  the  case  of 
"Kubla  Khan."  This  poem  was  conceived 
by  Coleridge  while  dreaming.  He  did  not 
intend  to  write  it ;  he  did  not  plan  it ;  an 
obscure  impulse  seized  him  during  his  sleep, 
and  he  created. 

Now  I  do  not  want  to  exaggerate  the 
value  of  this  illustration,  for  fear  that  I 
should  be  charged  with  speciousness  in 
argument,  but  I  cannot  help  being  impressed 
by  the  extraordinary  case  of  Coleridge. 
It  would  seem  that  the  instinct  to  create 
is  latent,  that  creation  is  a  process  removed 
from  the  scope  of  our  will,  and  it  may  be 
that  creation  with  intent  is  an  illusion,  that 
there  is  no  intent.  Perhaps  the  muse 
takes  up  her  lute  and  presses  kisses  upon 
96 


THE   ARTS 


the  poet's  brow.  I  am  inclined  to  believe 
in  this  extra-human  force,  a  thing  imponder- 
able, capricious  and  obscure,  which  will 
manifest  itself  in  the  untaught  fingers  of 
a  Cimabue  or  an  infant  Mozart ;  it  is 
almost  universally  recognised  that  genius 
is  not  an  infinite  capacity  for  taking  pains  : 
it  is  rather  an  infinite  capacity  for  taking 
no  pains,  for  surrendering  to  the  extra- 
human  and  allowing  it  to  work  its  will. 
Certainly  Boileau  advised  us  to  put  back 
our  work  upon  the  loom  one  hundred  times, 
but  he  was  a  poor  writer,  while  Beckford, 
writing  "  Vathek  "  in  a  few  days,  may  have 
written  for  immortality. 

I  do  not  seek  to  build  upon  "  Vathek  " 
and  "  Kubla  Khan  "  an  argument  by 
analogy,  for  these  are  only  indications  ;  but 
my  illustrations  are  important,  and  the 
erudite  will  easily  increase  their  number, 
for  they  tend  to  prove  my  point,  that  art, 
not  being  entirely  conscious,  is  a  process 
we  may  compare  with  physical  creation. 
For  we  never  know  when  we  physically 
create.  We  know  that  we  do  those  things 
which  may  create  life,  we  may  fully  intend 
97 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

them  to  be  physically  creative,  but  we  have 
no  means  of  knowing  whether  those  acts  or 
intentions  are  fruitful  or  fruitless.  It  is  not 
the  deed  creates :  it  is  some  obscure  con- 
junction of  circumstance,  some  physical 
condition  we  cannot  gauge  or  govern,  briefly 
an  extra-human  creative  force.  The  deed 
is  the  instrument,  not  the  force,  it  is  but 
part  of  the  chain  of  circumstance. 

If,  then,  we  assume  that  there  is  some 
similarity  between  artistic  and  physical 
creation  (and  I  do  not  suggest  that  the 
similarity  is  absolute)  we  find  that  while 
both  man  and  woman  are  recognised  as 
physically  creative  instruments,  artistic 
creation  is  supposedly  reserved  for  man : 
this  must,  in  the  light  of  my  non-demon- 
strable but  probably  accurate  assumption, 
be  incorrect.  If  physical  creativeness  and 
artistic  creativeness  spring  from  the  same 
fount  or  from  sister-sources,  woman  must 
potentially  be  as  capable  of  artistic  creation 
as  she  is  of  physical  creation.  Whether 
the  capacity  has  or  has  not  been  manifested 
matters  not  in  an  abstract  discussion  :  it  is 
enough  that  it  should  be  there.  If,  as  I 
98 


THE   ARTS 


believe,  it  is  there,  then  we  must  ask 
ourselves  the  cause  of  a  phenomenon, 
namely :  If  man  and  woman  are  potentially 
equal  in  artistic  receptiveness,  receptiveness 
to  the  extra-human  force  of  artistic  creation, 
then  why  has  man  so  far  stood  alone  as  the 
artistic  creator  ? 

There  is  no  denying  that  man  has  found 
no  rival  in  the  other  sex.  It  is  impossible 
to  put  George  Eliot  against  Turgenieff, 
Mme.  Morisot  against  Manet.  Nowhere 
has  a  woman  been  supreme,  not  in  letters, 
nor  in  the  pictorial  art,  nor  in  music ;  it  is 
debatable  even  whether  Siddons  was  greater 
than  Kean,  though  woman  may  make  a 
bid  for  superiority  in  histrionics,  the  lowest 
of  the  arts.  And  opinions  are  divided  as 
to  the  respective  merits  of  Pavlova  and 
Nijinski.  Broadly  speaking,  however,  I  do 
not  think  it  important  to  settle  whether 
woman  has  made  a  case  for  artistic  great- 
ness ;  it  would  be  easy  to  make  a  list  of 
women  who  have  shone  more  or  less 
brightly  in  the  various  forms  of  art,  but  it 
would  involve  a  long  and  sterile  discussion 
to  determine  whether  they  were  artists,  and 
99 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

the  result  would  be  valueless :  Feminists 
are  not  concerned  with  the  woman  of  the 
past.  They  use  her  as  an  indication  of 
possibilities,  as  a  signpost  which  shows 
what  woman  may  achieve  under  new  con- 
ditions, but  they  do  not  look  upon  her  as 
a  limiting  fact.  They  consider  that  the 
woman  of  the  past  and  the  woman  of  the 
future  are  very  different  creatures,  for  the 
woman  of  the  future  will  develop  under 
new  and  modifying  conditions. 

The  new  conditions  of  woman  will 
certainly  influence  her  artistic  capacity;  in 
certain  directions  her  emancipation  will  be 
notable,  in  others  incomplete.  One  of  the 
incomplete  emancipations  will  assuredly  be 
from  the  thraldom  of  child-bearing,  which 
I  do  not  suppose  she  will  abandon.  I 
think  we  may  safely  assume  that  the 
majority  of  women  consciously  or  uncon- 
sciously desire  to  have  children,  much  more 
so  than  to  practise  an  art.  Indeed,  as 
Miss  May  Sinclair  very  truly  says,*  to-day 
those  who  practise  an  art  tend  to  cast  it 
aside  when  they  marry.  But  that  is  not  a 

*  "  A  Defence  of  Man  "  (English  Review,  July,  1912). 


THE   ARTS 


very  good  argument,  for  I  do  not  think 
that  you  "  have  an  art "  ;  it  is  the  art  has 
you.  Presumably  the  new  woman  will  still 
have  children,  but  she  need  not  have  them 
and  hold  them  with  unreasoning  and 
primitive  ferocity ;  she  may  be  less  animal 
and  have  them  with  greater  sanity.  So 
far  the  child  has  been  the  enemy  of  art 
in  woman.  The  actual  periods  of  child- 
bearing,  nursing,  and  early  education  are 
long,  wearing,  and  nerve-racking;  whether 
merely  conceived  or  actually  born  the 
child  is  an  imperious  master  and  draws 
upon  every  reserve  of  its  mother's  strength  : 
it  is  not  wonderful  then  that  young  women 
who  showed  artistic  promise  should  have 
found  after  years  of  child-bearing  that  their 
craft  had  gone,  that  they  were  out  of  touch 
with  surrounding  life,  that  child-bearing,  an 
experience  in  itself,  had  not  enlarged  the 
vision  which  perceives  art. 

Woman  has  dragged  very  wearily  the 
load  imposed  upon  her  by  nature ;  it  is 
far  heavier  than  any  that  rests  upon  man, 
for  his  paternal  function  has  left  him  free, 
indeed  helped  him  to  develop  on  any  lines 
101 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

for  which  he  was  fitted  by  his  temperament. 
Artists  among  men  have  even  succeeded  in 
dominating  the  financial  demands  of  their 
family,  living  by,  as  well  as  for  their  art. 
But  woman  has  not  been  able  to  do  this ; 
there    has    been    in    her   a   life-clamour,   a 
diversion    of   the  need    for  self-expression. 
Nature  has  compelled  her  to  make  jewels  of 
her  sons.     With  the  passing  of  the  years  she 
has  been  dulled  and  her  energies  have  been 
drained ;  when  child-bearing  was  over  she  has 
found  herself  ground  by  the  habit  of  child- 
rearing,  left  behind  by  art.     For  art,  eternal 
as  it  is,  changes  but  does  not  go  back  ;   it 
develops   with   life,    selects    from    it,    finds 
itself  in  the  new  machine,  the  new  social 
system.     It  never  goes  back,  and  conscious 
reactions   towards   cruder  civilisations  are 
dishonest  and  inartistic.     You  must  grow 
in  art  as  you  live,  change  as  life  changes ; 
the  artist  is  always  the  most  modern  of  the 
moderns,    for   he    carries   the   life-essence 
itself. 

It  will  be  argued  that  child-bearing  is 
not  the  whole  answer,  for  many  women  do 
not  marry,  and  of  those  who  marry  some 


THE   ARTS 


are  barren,  while  others  have  very  small 
families.  That  is  so,  but  the  preoccupation 
of  the  child  extends  to  the  women  who  do 
not  ally.  Of  these  a  small  number  con- 
sciously desire  children,  another  section 
desires  them  but  is  too  modest  to  say  so, 
while  a  number,  who  believe  they  want 
a  mate,  really  want  a  child.  The  desire 
for  the  child  is  a  desire  for  self-realisation, 
for  an  extension  of  personality  such  as 
the  poet  finds  in  a  poem  which,  he  hopes, 
will  be  immortal.  The  time  and  energy 
absorbed  by  these  dreams  has  been  stolen 
from  the  artistic  reserve  :  it  has  been  stolen 
from  nowhere  else,  for  art  and  maternity 
are  similar  enough  in  spirit  to  show  that 
there  can  be  no  reserve  other  than  the 
artistic.  The  preoccupation  has  generally 
taken  the  form  of  a  desire  for  a  mate,  whom 
woman  has  for  centuries  had  to  hunt  down 
and  capture.  She  has  wanted  him  for 
many  reasons,  but  mainly  because  she 
wanted  children.  Woman  has  wanted  a 
mate  also  for  the  sake  of  her  status  ;  worst 
of  all  she  has  wanted  him  because  she 
had  somehow  to  earn  a  living.  All  this 
103 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

has  deflected  woman  from  the  arts.  For 
thousands  of  years  she  has  had  to  hunt 
man,  to  cajole  him,  and  it  served  her  ill  to 
arouse  by  artistic  achievement  the  jealousy 
of  her  quarry.  It  is  still  said,  and  still  true, 
that  men  do  not  like  clever  women  unless 
they  are  clever  enough  to  appear  fools: 
in  no  direction  has  this  been  so  apparent 
as  in  the  arts.  To  this  day  there  are 
many  men  who  are  charmed  if  a  woman 
paints  flowers  on  satin,  disturbed  if  she 
hews  rugged  nakedness  from  marble ;  they 
like  her  to  play  a  little  piece,  to  compose 
gentle  verse  in  the  honour  of  a  child's 
broken  hoop,  but  they  feel  there  is  some- 
thing wrong  when  Laurence  Hope  writes  a 
passionate  poem. 

Man-hunting  has  been  responsible  for  a 
concealment  of  artistic  capacity  which 
amounts  to  stifling ;  it  has  been  so  dis- 
turbing an  occupation  that  many  of  the 
ablest  women  have,  as  George  Sand,  thrown 
down  the  gauntlet  and  freed  themselves 
from  the  marriage  thrall.  But  other  women, 
whose  strength  was  less  than  their  art, 
have,  like  Emily  and  Anne  Bronte  and 
104 


THE   ARTS 


Christina  Rossetti,  wasted  away  in  sterile 
spinsterhood,  while  others,  following  the 
example  I  alluded  to  in  another  chapter, 
have  suppressed  their  work  because  man 
disapproved  of  it.  They  had  to  pretend 
that  they  were  futile,  to  flatter  man  by 
claiming  inferiority  to  him ;  to  please  him 
they  concentrated  on  samplers,  on  paper 
flowers,  on  little  morocco-bound  diaries 
entitled  "  Mes  Larmes,"  *  on  things  man 
could  call  pretty  and  praise,  not  on  things 
he  would  grudgingly  call  great.  Woman 
has  handled  talent  as  wastefully  as  nature 
handles  life,  and  perhaps  for  the  same 
reason :  nature  must  know  that  life  is  in- 
exhaustible, woman  may  have  felt  that 
there  was  in  her  so  much  that  was  fine  that 
she  could  afford  to  wait. 

Woman  was  never  encouraged  to  do 
more  than  wait.  The  home  circle  has 
always  coalesced  to  keep  her  down,  to 
conceal  the  clever  girl's  cleverness,  to  train 
out  of  her  her  originality ;  this  because 
parents  knew  that  the  marriage  chances  of 
their  clever  daughters  were  small.  Parents 

*  See  Thackeray  in  general,  woman's  worst  enemy. 

105  H 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

felt,  and  most  of  them  still  feel,  that  marriage 
is  woman's  career  ;  the  idea  of  not  "  getting 
rid  "  of  their  girls,  finding  men  who  would 
buy  them,  was  repugnant  to  them,  and  they 
tended  to  despise  those  who  had  not  been 
asked  in  marriage.  The  mother  was  harder 
than  the  father,  for  there  is  a  sensual  bond 
between  every  woman  and  every  man  ;  the 
father  was  therefore  more  sympathetic, 
more  inclined  to  take  pride  in  his  daughter's 
ability ;  besides  the  mother,  because  she 
was  the  mother,  was  always,  when  compared 
with  her  daughter,  twenty-five  years  out  of 
date.  While  the  father  felt  sex-sympathy 
for  his  daughter  the  mother  felt  sex-rivalry 
and,  often  unconsciously,  tried  to  prevent 
the  development  of  qualities  she  envied 
as  well  as  despised.  Lastly  there  was 
son-worship,  a  peculiarly  Anglo-Teutonic 
disease,  from  which  America  is  almost  free 
and  from  which  the  Latins  will  be  exempt 
when  Latin  women  choose.  The  training 
of  daughters  has  always  been  sacrificed  to 
that  of  the  sons ;  the  latter  cost  so  much 
that  there  is  nothing  left  for  the  former  :  if 
Jack  and  Jill  are  both  clever,  Jack  will 
106 


THE   ARTS 


certainly  go  to  Oriel  and  Jill  may  go  to 
Newnham.  But  if  the  demand  is  for  artistic 
training  Jill  is  in  much  worse  case;  the 
home  circle  does  not  believe  that  there  is 
anything  in  Jill.  If  Jack  absolutely  must 
paint  he  is  sent  to  Paris  ;  if  he  has  sworn 
to  write,  somebody  finds  him  a  post  in  a 
newspaper  office.  But  if  Jill  says  she  is  a 
painter  she  may  at  length  be  grudgingly 
given  a  year  at  the  Slade,  or  if  it  is  music 
one  of  the  less  renowned  masters  of  the 
Royal  Academy  will  be  retained  (but  she 
must  not  ask  for  a  public  recital)  ;  and  if 
she  wants  to  write  .  .  .  poor  Jill,  the  home 
circle  lends  a  bored  ear  to  the  reading  of 
her  first  short  story  and  suggests  that  it 
should  be  sent  to  Science  Si/tings. 

The  home  circle  is  not  altogether  kind  to 
the  sons,  but  when  it  comes  to  the  girls  it 
merely  doesn't  believe  that  they  can  do 
anything.  There  have  been  prophets  in 
their  own  country,  but  no  prophetesses. 
At  any  rate  the  family  has  never  been  in- 
clined to  speculate  on  a  prophetess,  to  give 
the  artistic  girl  that  which  is  the  life-blood 
of  her  art :  appreciation,  understanding  and 
107 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

encouragement;  still  less  has  it  given  her 
the  education,  the  opportunities  to  travel 
which  were  essential  if  she  was  to  apply 
her  natural  capacity.  Elizabeth  Barrett 
and  Jane  Austen,  notably,  grew  up  in  bitter, 
sceptical,  limited  homes,  where  they  were 
doubted,  mocked,  censured  and  oppressed. 
They  triumphed,  but  I  think  they  would 
have  done  bigger  work  if  they  had  not,  in 
early  years,  been  ground  by  traditional 
discipline.  And  they  succeeded  :  what  of 
those  who  were  not  so  strong  ?  whose  talent 
was  delicate  rather  than  robust  ?  The 
world  knows  nothing  of  these.  In  art  as 
in  science  they  have  never  had  their  share 
of  recognition  :  who  knows  that  Miss 
Herschell  was  as  great  as  her  brother  ? 
who  is  surprised  when  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells 
causes  a  male  character  to  attribute  to 
Curie  alone  the  merit  of  the  discoveries  he 
made  with  his  wife  ?  *  In  the  arts  it  has 
seldom  been  acknowledged  that  woman  did 
more  than  assist  when  she  collaborated, 
and  when  she  stood  alone  she  has  been 
discounted.  That  has  discouraged  her, 
*  See  "  Marriage." 
108 


THE   ARTS 


compelled  her  to  do  "  woman's  work,"  bred 
in  her  the  habit  of  producing  this  minor 
work,  because  thus  only  could  she  earn 
man's  praise. 

It  should  be  said  that  the  quality  ot 
woman's  artistic  work  differs  as  a  rule  from 
that  of  man's  work.  One  can  generally 
tell  a  woman's  writings,  and  the  anti- 
Feminist  points  a  scornful  finger  at  her 
delineation  of  the  average  man  .  .  .  but 
we  can  point  a  retaliating  finger  at  the 
creature  the  male  writer  calls  woman.  I 
think  Mrs.  Karin  Michaelis  would  smile 
even  at  the  women  of  Mr.  Henry  James  and 
George  Meredith.  It  is  not  an  insult  to 
say  "woman's  work,"  for  I  take  it  as  a 
canon  of  art  that  one  must  express  oneself: 
it  is  not  too  much  to  add  that  one  must 
express  one's  sex.  I  do  not  believe  that 
there  is  a  thing  called  art,  other  than  self- 
expression,  and  there  are  no  degrees  in  art; 
the  worker  is  an  artist  or  is  not  an  artist. 
Thus  I  make  for  woman  no  qualified  claim, 
do  not  put  forward  that  she  is  capable  of 
"good"  art,  or  "great"  art,  or  "some 
measure  of  "  art :  I  claim  that  she  is  capable 
109 


WOMAN    AND   TO-MORROW 

of  expressing  herself.  Madame  Vig6e 
le  Brun's  pictures  were  not  specially  good, 
but  they  were  as  good  as  those  of  the  men 
of  her  period,  and  they  expressed  it  and 
herself;  to-day  Miss  Anne  Estelle  Rice 
paints  in  a  style  fully  equal  to  that  of  the 
men  of  her  school ;  and  the  personality  of 
Miss  Edith  Wharton  bursts  through  the 
restraints  of  her  style.  Provided  there  be 
something  to  express  it  is  enough  to  ex- 
press it,  and  it  does  not  matter  much  that 
there  have  so  far  been  no  female  peers  of 
Shakespeare  or  Wagner. 

Because  some  great  male  artists  were 
colossal  we  must  not  assume  that  all  men 
artists  were  colossal :  d'Arvers  left  one 
sonnet,  Oscar  Wilde  was  capricious,  Lulli 
light,  yet  all  three  were  artists.  Art  in 
woman  need  not  be  crushing  as  a  bludgeon 
to  be  recognised  as  art. 

Such  differences  are  those  which  exist 
between  the  pointillism  of  Diaz  and  the 
flat  expanses  of  Puvis  de  Chavannes — 
differences  of  texture  but  not  of  degree. 
While  it  may  broadly  be  said  that  man's 
tendency  is  towards  the  general,  that  of 


THE   ARTS 


woman  is  towards  the  particular.  This 
is  a  result  of  education  and  environment 
rather  than  of  temperament,  and  that  is 
why  woman's  work  differs  from  man's : 
while  man,  being  in  the  world,  has  thought 
in  terms  of  the  world  and  of  immortality, 
woman,  being  in  the  home,  has  thought  in 
terms  of  the  home  and  perishable  things. 
Religion  has  alone  enabled  her  to  slough 
the  body.  Thrust  back  upon  herself  she 
has  developed  the  traits  which  thrive 
best  in  a  confined  atmosphere,  she  has  put 
them  into  her  artistic  work,  and  these 
traits  are  an  undue  appreciation  of  the 
weight  of  sex,  emotionalism  and  the 
histrionic  tendency.  To  the  histrionic 
tendency  woman  owes  her  position  as  an 
actress,  and,  though  I  rate  the  histrionic 
power  low,  I  see  no  reason  why  comparison 
between  man  and  woman  should  not  be 
allowed  because  woman  may  be  the  victor. 
It  will  certainly  be  hard  to  prove  that 
Madame  Sarah  Bernhardt,  La  Duse, 
Rachel,  perhaps  Sada  Yacco,  do  not  drive 
from  the  field  their  male  associates:  that 
power  is  artistic,  and  I  retain  it  as  an 


WOMAN  AND   TO-MORROW 

evidence  of  further  powers,  careless  of 
those  other  qualities  which  woman  puts 
into  her  artistic  works. 

Certainly  she  is  sex-oppressed,  and  man 
knows  it.  It  is  a  commonplace  one  often 
hears  expressed  that  "  when  women  begin 
to  be  nasty  they  are  nastier  than  men,"  but 
it  is  also  an  untruth.  We  must  not  be 
carried  away  by  the  instance  of  certain  of 
our  female  novelists ;  their  work  shows 
sensuality,  but  I  should  be  surprised  if  it 
were  suggested  that  it  is  cruder  than 
"  Moll  Flanders  "  and  "  The  Adventures  of 
Casanova,"  or  more  sex-stimulating  than 
"  Les  Aventures  du  Roi  Pausole."  I  have 
still  to  discover  the  woman  who  will  exceed 
Zola  and  Anatole  France.  Thus,  though 
it  may  be  said  that  woman  is  sex-oppressed, 
it  is  not  right  to  say  that  her  view  of  it  is 
"  nasty."  I  shall  return  to  this  topic  in 
another  chapter :  all  that  need  be  said 
here  is  that  if  woman's  literary  work  is 
largely  sex-impregnated,  it  is  because  she 
has  for  so  many  thousands  of  years  been 
maintained  in  a  sexual  atmosphere.  She 
has  been  taught  that  sex  is  her  business 

112 


THE   ARTS 


and  she  has  made  it  her  monopoly,  which 
is  not  very  strange,  given  that  the  artist 
generally  deals  with  that  which  he  knows. 
No  one  would  expect  a  woman  just  eman- 
cipated from  the  harem  to  take  part  in  a 
Lancashire  bye-election,  yet  that  is  the 
attitude  of  those  who  resent  the  predomin- 
ance of  sex-matters  in  woman's  writings. 
When  women  have  had  more  experience  of 
life  their  scope  will  be  greater,  and  already 
such  writers  as  Miss  Amber  Reeves,  Miss 
Constance  Smedley,  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward 
have  shown,  imperfectly  but  clearly,  that 
woman  can  think  of  things  other  than  love 
and  lovers.  Sexual  and  emotional  quality, 
that  quality  which  makes  the  greatness 
of  "  Jane  Eyre,"  she  will  never  lose  :  but 
she  will  concentrate  it,  this  force  of  life  and 
evidence  of  hope,  and  thereupon  use  it  on 
other  things. 

Already  we  see  the  drift  of  woman's 
artistic  tendency  in  the  utterly  bad  and 
cramped  home  she  is  entrusted  with.  She 
is  the  decorator,  whatever  be  her  resources 
or  her  social  status;  seldom  does  the 
man  intervene.  There  are  few  households 
113 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

where  the  man  is  consulted  as  to  the 
material  with  which  the  chairs  shall  be 
covered,  as  to  the  colour  of  the  carpet,  and 
the  scores  of  aesthetic  points  which  arise 
in  house-furnishing ;  as  a  rule  he  does  not 
even  select  his  bedroom  wallpaper,  and  if 
he  has  a  study  he  tells  his  wife  to  find 
something  solid.  If  he  be  one  of  those 
men  to  whom  the  appearance  of  the  home 
matters  he  may  control  one  of  those  two 
rooms,  but  he  has  neither  the  time  nor  the 
knowledge  to  concern  himself  with  the 
others ;  generally  he  trusts  his  wife,  and  if 
her  taste  be  often  very  bad  it  is  as  a  rule 
less  dull  and  heavy  than  his  own.  The 
pink  drawing-room  is  an  abominable  thing, 
its  knick-knackery  of  silver  frames,  silk 
screens,  china  pigs  is  in  bad  taste,  but  it 
has  lightness,  some  artificial  if  meretrici- 
ous grace  ;  it  is  certainly  less  ugly  than  the 
red-papered  room  filled  with  leather  arm- 
chairs and  decorated  with  Asiatic  weapons, 
which  the  equivalent  man  affects.  In 
every  class  it  is  the  woman  carries  the 
artistic  tradition  of  the  family;  she  has 
naught  but  glimmerings  of  beauty,  but  it  is 
114 


THE   ARTS 


she  has  them.  There  are  many  houses  still 
where  reign  the  antimacassar,  the  glass- 
cased  wax  fruits,  and  the  cabinet  filled  with 
Crown  Derby,  and  all  these  are  ugly 
enough ;  yet  they  embody  the  idea  of 
ornament,  which  is  nothing  but  a  very  low 
form  of  the  idea  of  beauty.  Those  are 
women's  works ;  it  is  women  buy  the 
knick-knacks,  the  light  chintzes,  the  fancy 
tea-sets,  and  in  the  working-class  it  is  they 
bring  home  the  Japanese  fans  and  the 
"  Presents  from  Southend." 

Generally  woman's  taste  is  bad,  but  of 
late  years  it  has  enormously  improved.  It 
was  woman  and  not  man  looked  kindly 
upon  Morris  chintz  and  wallpaper,  de 
Morgan  tiles,  leadless  glaze,  pewter,  "  New 
Art  "  ;  it  was  she  experimented  more  or  less 
successfully.  To-day  it  is  she  buys  copies 
of  Chippendale  chairs  and  Jacobean  tapes- 
tries ;  it  is  for  her  that  are  made  costly 
"  Chinese "  wallpapers,  "  Louis  XV " 
electric-light  fittings.  She  is  the  decorator 
of  the  home ;  when  she  succeeds  she  is 
very  good,  and  when  she's  defeated  she 
has  tried.  Likewise  she  is  the  musician. 
"5 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

From  the  earliest  days  of  civilisation  it  is 
woman  has  sung,  danced,  played  the  spinet 
and  the  harp,  and  now  plays  the  piano  and 
sings.  Man  has  always  been  a  little 
shamefaced  when  asked  to  do  aught  save 
sing  a  battle,  drinking,  or  comic  song ;  he 
was  not  incapable,  but  self-conscious.  As 
a  result  the  average  man  has  fallen  in 
capacity  below  the  average  woman.  I  am 
well  aware  that  this  home  music  is  a  very 
poor,  passionless,  amateurish  thing,  but  still 
it  is  something,  a  refining,  idealising  force, 
and  from  the  Feminist  point  of  view  it  goes 
to  prove  that  there  is  in  the  female  sex  an 
immense,  if  indefinite  hunger  for  beauty. 
It  does  not  matter  much  whether  the 
music  be  ill  chosen  and  badly  played,  any 
more  than  whether  the  decoration  be 
faulty.  I  do  not  contend  that  because 
there  are  a  million  inferior  tastes,  a  spirit  of 
humility  will  bring  to  light  a  single  good 
taste,  but  I  do  believe  that  a  desire  for 
beauty  must  lie  behind  the  actual  realisa- 
tion of  the  beautiful.  It  is  thus  important 
to  recognise  that  the  tendency  of  woman 
is  more  than  that  of  man  towards  the 
1x6 


THE   ARTS 


beautiful,  for  she  is  the  source  from  which 
truer  and  finer  realisations  will  spring. 

I  have,  I  think,  said  ad  nauseam  that 
development  on  Feminist  lines  will  enlarge 
woman's  experience  of  life :  it  is  not  too 
much  to  expect  that  the  practice  of  affairs 
will  stimulate  her  creative  capacity. 
When  she  no  longer  decays  in  idleness  or 
wears  herself  out  by  labour  she  must  give 
the  measure  of  unsuspected  qualities.  Re- 
generated by  the  new  respect  which  man 
must  slowly  acquire  for  his  partner  as  she 
becomes  his  equal,  woman  will  no  longer 
trim.  In  the  past  a  few  women  have  not 
trimmed,  and  perhaps  the  more  numerous 
women  who  to-day  have  courage  owe  them 
a  debt  as  pioneers.  To-day  a  few  are  not 
trimming ;  notable  among  the  writers  are 
such  women  as  Miss  Amber  Reeves,  whose 
style  is  perfectly  restrained,  or  such  as  Miss 
Ethel  Colburn  Mayne,  a  worthy  follower 
of  Mr.  Henry  James.  There  will  be  more 
such  women,  and  the  women  to  come 
will  be  bigger,  for  they  will  be  afraid  of 
nothing.  With  Feminism  will  come  a 
limitation  of  hours  of  labour,  a  levelling  of 
117 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

salaries  and  wages,  revolutionary  economic 
measures  of  which  the  mortgage  on  the 
earnings  of  man  and  the  endowment  of 
motherhood  are  part,  and  all  this  will  mean 
for  woman  an  intellectual,  artistic  freedom 
which  no  woman  has  to-day. 

Woman  has  not  these  freedoms  to-day, 
even  when  she  is  rich  in  her  own  right,  for 
she  is  overlaid  by  public  opinion.  She  may 
become  an  outcast  if  she  chooses  to  defy 
the  marriage  laws  ;  she  must,  to  a  certain 
extent,  "  behave  like  a  lady."  We  are  going 
to  erase  from  the  dictionary  the  word  which 
reigns  supreme  in  "  business  lady,"  and 
"  lady  doctor,"  and  "  lady  gardener,"  to  say 
nothing  of  "  lady  dog  "  ;  we  are  going  to 
have  women.  And  all  these  freedoms, 
economic  and  mental  and  physical,  must 
mean  that  woman  will  look  towards  the 
wider  horizons  of  art,  no  longer  with  the 
old,  sick  longing,  but  boldly  and  as  a  con- 
queror. Relief  from  home-labour,  especially, 
will  mean  true  freedom.  Already  Socialists, 
Extreme-Radicals  and  Individualists  look 
to  short  hours  for  the  development  of  the 
arts ;  they  currently  tell  us  that  in  the 
118 


THE   ARTS 


working  class  lies  an  immense  reserve  of 
talent,  and  a  little  genius ;  they  do  not 
contend  that  ability  will  out  in  spite  of 
poverty  and  sweating ;  they  see  in  their 
Utopia  a  condition  when  body  and  mind 
will  not  be  exhausted  by  work  and  when 
the  arts  may  be  pursued.  It  is  on  those 
lines  we  reason  and  the  same  relief  we  seek 
for  woman. 

I  suspect  that  the  Feminist  home  itself 
will  be  far  more  artistic  than  the  cast-iron 
organisation  in  which  we  live.  Given  the 
taste  that  woman  displays  to-day  in  her 
limited  sphere,  I  believe  that  the  new 
woman  will  be  more  experimental  and  more 
daring,  because  she  will  be  able  to  dare. 

I  have  attacked  the  home,  and  bitterly, 
but  I  do  not  believe  that  it  will  be  replaced 
by  barracks  in  which  every  individual  will 
be  neatly  pigeonholed  :  that  may  prove  to 
be  desirable  when  our  mentality  has  altered, 
but,  judging  from  our  present  outlook,  such 
a  consummation  is  unlikely.  A  smaller 
home,  free  from  the  tyranny  of  coal-dust, 
provided  with  labour-saving  appliances, 
must  come  into  existence  and  be  ruled  as 
119 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

heretofore  by  the  expert  woman ;  I  think 
the  man  will  co-operate  with  her  in  their 
voluntary  association,  but  I  imagine  him 
as  busier  in  outside  affairs  than  his  com- 
panion will  want  to  be. 

Artistically,  woman  must  remain  pre- 
occupied with  the  home,  but  she  will  no 
longer  shut  herself  up  in  a  semi-detached 
zenana  ;  she  will,  as  now,  invest  it  with  her 
personality,  but  she  will  also  go  further 
afield,  seeking  experience,  making  com- 
parisons. "  Her  place  is  in  the  home," 
says  man  to-day,  and  he  is  right  to  this 
extent  that  she  chooses  to  make  it  her 
place.  But  under  Feminist  conditions 
woman  will  appear  as  the  forager,  rather 
as  the  friendly  rival  who  would  do  more 
than  the  man  for  their  joint  enterprise ; 
when  birds  go  a-mating,  both  the  male  and 
the  female  collect  materials  for  the  nest. 
That  is,  in  close  metaphor,  how  I  see  the 
new  woman  in  her  new  relation.  She  will 
no  longer  look  upon  herself  as  bound  to 
watch  by  the  fireside ;  rather  she  will  go 
out,  see  what  others  do,  make  notes,  enter 
into  controversy,  initiate,  and  the  fruits  of 


THE   ARTS 


her  stimulated  brain  will  be  such  as  have 
never  before  been  seen,  when  women  were 
not  respected  and  were  humble  because 
they  were  downtrodden.  Art  is  in  the 
artist,  true  enough,  and  nothing  will  put  it 
in  his  soul  when  it  is  not  there  :  all  we  claim 
is  that  environment,  physical  and  mental, 
matters,  and  that,  by  providing  the  best 
environment  we  shall  at  last  give  play  to 
woman's  ancient,  if  despised  faculty  of  art. 


V 
WOMAN   AND   LABOUR 


V 
WOMAN   AND   LABOUR 

IT  is  an  open  question  whether  labour 
is  good  for  woman,  whether  it  develops 
in    her    faculties    which    are    worth 
developing,   whether   it   does   not,   on    the 
other  hand,  stunt  her  sex  qualities.     We 
must,   of    course,   come    to    some    under- 
standing  as  to  the  meaning  of  the   word 
"labour,"  which  suggests  something  difficult 
and  arduous,  while  its   synonym    "  work," 
is  often  taken  to  mean  a  light  and  possibly 
futile   task.      "  Labour "    may   be   defined 
either  as  "  the  production  of  some  useful 
commodity,  the  rendering  of  some  useful 
service,"  or  as  "  any   distasteful   but  pro- 
fitable  occupation."     The    first    definition 
is   not   easily   applied,  for  usefulness   is  a 
matter  of  opinion,  and  it  may  be  that  if 
Diogenes   passed   down    Bond    Street    he 
would   see   a   great   number   of   wares   he 
125 


WOMAN    AND   TO-MORROW 

could  do  without ;  the  second  definition  is 
exact  enough,  whatever  idealists  may  say, 
for  there  are  not  many  men  and  hardly 
any  women  who  would  work  unless  com- 
pelled to.  For  the  purposes  of  this  chapter, 
however,  I  will  take  labour  in  the  first 
sense,  so  as  to  avoid  being  drawn  into  a 
controversy  with  Ruskinites  and  Morrisites, 
with  Utopians  in  general,  who  contend  that 
the  synonym  of  "  labour  "  should  be 
"  pleasure  "  and  not  "  pain." 

Working  women  are  to  be  found  in  every 
class  of  the  community,  but  we  may  safely 
ignore  the  few  who  have  entered  the  pro- 
fessions and  those  who  conduct  businesses, 
and  base  conclusions  rather  on  the  six 
great  trades  of  teachers,  civil  servants, 
nurses,  shop-employees,  factory  workers, 
and  domestics.  The  conditions  which  affect 
them  in  the  labour-market  are  evident 
enough;  they  are  almost  invariably  sweated, 
subjected  to  a  humiliating  discipline,  fre- 
quently debarred  from  marriage.  The  dis- 
abilities which  attach  to  their  condition 
strike  at  that  of  the  men  in  a  lesser  degree: 
it  is  true  that  shopmen  may  not  as  a  rule 
126 


WOMAN    AND  LABOUR 

marry,  but  it  is  also  true  that  many  do,  and 
that  they  can  conceal  the  breach  of  the 
rules  far  better  than  women,  for  child- 
bearing  does  not  disclose  the  irregularity; 
it  is  true  that  men  are  sweated,  but  it  is 
also  true  that  the  boards  which  deal  with 
sweated  industries  are  concerned  mainly 
with  trades  monopolised  by  women,  such 
as  box  and  shirt  making.  The  inequality 
of  treatment  is  so  evident  that  female 
teachers  and  civil  servants  start  on  a  scale 
lower  than  that  of  the  men,  that  the  better- 
paid  posts  go  to  the  men,  that  certain 
County  Councils  make  a  point  of  appointing 
in  their  Training  Colleges  a  male  principal 
and  a  female  vice-principal.  This  has 
become  so  notorious  and  so  scandalous 
that  it  is  hardly  worth  while  to  dilate  on 
the  fact,  unless  it  be  necessary  to  say  a 
thing  three  times  to  convince  some  people 
that  it  is  true.  And  three  times  may  not 
be  enough. 

Feminists  are  primarily  arrayed  against 

this   state   of   things,   but   before  showing 

how   they   hope   to   remedy   it,   I   wish  to 

consider  whether  the  effects  of  labour  upon 

127 


WOMAN   AND.  TO-MORROW-  ,,1 

women  are  such  as  to  warrant  its  extension 
among  them  and  whether  it  might  not  be 
better  to  claim  for  woman  a  favoured  posi- 
tion where  she  would  do  no  work  in  the 
old  sense.  If  we  consider  working  women 
who  have  behind  them  an  adequate  record, 
say  ten  years  of  employment,  a  good  case 
can  be  made  against  the  labour  to  which 
they  are  at  present  subjected.  The  working 
woman  of  thirty  is  not,  as  a  rule,  a  fine 
specimen  of  her  sex.  She  may  be,  usually 
is,  more  intelligent  than  her  sheltered  sister, 
but  she  has  generally  lost  her  beauty,  she 
has  hardened,  she  has  approximated  to 
man ;  now  it  may  be  desired  by  some  to 
level  the  sexes,  to  create  "the  female  male" 
who  will  regenerate  the  race,  but  I  cannot 
say  that  I  view  the  coming  of  this  hybrid 
with  equanimity.  The  working  woman  has, 
if  she  wishes  to  succeed,  i.e.  to  live,  to 
thrust  her  sex  into  the  background,  to 
abandon,  often  by  order,  the  pretty  frip- 
peries the  lighter  delight  in ;  she  has  to 
become  accurate,  shrewd,  quick,  to  lose 
her  natural  hesitations  and  the  appealing 
languors  of  the  slave.  Her  new  mentality 
128 


WOMAN   AND   LABOUR 

reacts  upon  her  manner,  and  I  show  in 
another  chapter  how  the  new-woman  has 
lost  much  of  the  false  courtesies  of  the 
old ;  labour  makes  woman  harsh,  inimical 
to  man,  therefore  less  fit  to  co-operate  with 
him. 

Labour  has  deeper  effects  than  those, 
for  the  new  mental  outlook  does  more  than 
affect  manners,  it  affects  the  body  and 
coalesces  with  physical  labour  itself  to  ruin 
that  which  is  and  should  remain  beautiful. 
Consider  indeed  a  gathering  of  working 
women  whose  lives  are  not  specially  arduous, 
such  as  teachers.  It  is  my  impression,  which 
can  easily  be  checked,  that  teachers  as  a  class 
have  lost  their  good  looks ;  their  complexions 
have  deteriorated,  become  either  pale  or 
coarse,  their  skin  has  become  lined  ;  many 
suffer  from  short-sight.  I  do  not  lay  the 
blame  for  this  wreck  on  labour  alone,  for 
teachers  do  not  as  a  rule  set  much  store  by 
their  looks  ;  they  do  not,  cannot,  devote  to 
the  care  of  their  person  the  time  which  their 
sheltered  sisters  freely  use  in  that  cause, 
but  I  do  indirectly  blame  labour  therefor, 
because  it  has  deflected  woman  from  the 
129 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

pursuit  of  her  own  beauty :  I  have  said  that 
they  lack  the  time  to  tend  their  bodies,  and 
that  is  a  grievance  against  labour,  for  labour 
it  is  has  stolen  this  time. 

A  gathering  of  male  teachers  does  not 
convey  the  same  impression.  They  are 
not  a  specially  handsome  class,  but  they 
appear  as  ordinary  men  ;  they  are  not  readily 
identifiable  as  schoolmasters,  while  to  say 
of  a  woman  that  "  she  looked  like  a  school- 
mistress "  is  to  brand  her  at  once  with  a 
mark  that  anybody  can  recognise.  Labour 
in  this  case  must,  therefore,  mean  that  where- 
as man  has  performed  it  unscathed,  woman 
has  suffered,  lost  something  of  her  general 
quality  and  acquired  a  particular  quality 
which  is  not  seductive. 

We  need  not,  however,  confine  this  brief 
survey  to  school  teachers.  The  nurse, 
having  no  masculine  equivalent,  can  be 
set  aside  if  I  remark  in  passing  that  nervous 
breakdown  frequently  follows  on  her  work. 
The  factory  worker  offers  a  broader  scope. 
Now  it  was  given  to  me,  some  three  years 
ago,  to  spend  an  entire  fortnight  in  a 
Lancashire  factory,  to  live  among  the 
130 


WOMAN    AND    LABOUR 

workers,  and  to  see  them  at  work  and  at 
play.  It  was  one  of  the  finest,  best-ven- 
tilated, best  organised  factories  in  England ; 
it  was  governed  by  a  generous  man  with 
worthy  lieutenants;  the  hours  worked  by 
women  averaged  but  forty-five  a  week ;  the 
wages  were  equal  or  superior  to  trade-union 
or  current  rate.  A  fortnight  was  not  enough 
to  enlighten  me  as  to  the  mental  outlook  of 
the  women-workers,  but  it  sufficed  to  show 
me  that,  even  under  the  best  conditions, 
their  outward  aspect  suffered.  Though 
most  of  those  1,200  women  were  young, 
they  already  bore  the  stamp  of  labour  upon 
them :  their  colour  was  not  good,  they 
stooped,  they  were  liable  to  the  sudden 
flushes  which  reveal  a  poor  circulation. 
They  were  infinitely  superior  in  physique 
to  women  employed  in  a  neighbouring 
great  town,  but  they  were  certainly  animals 
inferior  to  the  male  workers,  for  the  latter 
were  mostly  fine  specimens,  while  the 
women  were  no  more  than  "  not  so  bad  as 
they  were  elsewhere."  It  may  be  said  that 
I  paint  too  black  a  picture,  but  let  the 
unprejudiced  observer  assist  at  the  exit  of 


WOMAN    AND   TO-MORROW 

the  workers  of  any  factory  during  the  dinner- 
hour,  and  it  will  be  surprising  if  his  verdict 
for  physical  fitness  goes  to  the  women.  And 
this  will  load  the  dice  against  the  men,  for 
most  women-workers  are  mere  girls,  while 
many  of  the  men  are  toilworn  and  old ;  but 
even  then  I  think  he  will  find  more  unsatis- 
factory bodies  among  the  girls  than  among 
the  men. 

The  shop-girl  supplies  an  equally  damning 
comparison  ;  though  the  physique  of  the 
shopman  be  poor  he  is  not  so  often  as  she 
consumptive  or  anaemic,  while  he  seldom 
suffers  from  varicose  veins.  But  the  most 
striking  trade,  a  far  from  insignificant,  that 
of  the  charwoman,  fully  shows  that  if  woman 
is  at  all  suited  for  labour,  the  rougher  forms 
must  be  excluded.  A  great  many  of  these 
women  may  any  day  be  seen,  Temple- 
laundresses,  office-cleaners,  workers  by  the 
day ;  they  are  wretchedly  thin  or  unhealthily 
fat ;  they  are  often  drunken  (which  means 
merely  that  they  are  ill  and  unhappy) ;  they 
have  lost  all  the  attributes  of  femininity, 
fine  teeth,  abundant  hair.  The  men  of  their 
class  make  a  braver  show,  for  they  usually 
132 


WOMAN    AND    LABOUR 

look  thirty-five  when  they  are  thirty-five, 
while  their  charwomen  wives  cause  one  to 
wonder  whether  they  are  not  approaching 
fifty.  I  do  not  think  the  case  for  hard  work 
for  women  is  arguable,  even  when  performed 
under  the  best  conditions,  namely,  in  the 
fields.  We  have  realised  that  women  can- 
not work  in  mines,  but  we  still  find  them 
at  work  on  the  countryside,  hoeing,  carrying 
sheaves,  drawing  water  from  the  well. 
From  the  place  in  which  I  write  these  lines 
I  can  see  one  whom  I  happen  to  know : 
she  is  the  foster  sister  of  a  sheltered  woman. 
The  latter  has  preserved  her  youth  and 
her  grace ;  the  former,  bent,  burned  brick- 
brown,  with  silver-streaked  hair,  has  amazed 
me  by  confessing  that  she  is  thirty-eight. 

In  the  main,  therefore,  I  should  view  with 
pleasure  a  society  where  women  did  no 
labour  in  the  sense  of  my  definitions.  I  do 
not  think  that  it  is  the  function  of  every 
human  being  to  work,  and  am  not  con- 
vinced that  there  is  anything  ennobling 
in  labour  as  such.  Labour  binds  the  soul 
to  the  soil,  "  breathes  upon  its  star 
and  detaches  its  wings,"  substitutes  for 
133 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

speculation  and  self-development  the  grind 
of  habit  and  the  depression  born  of  physical 
fatigue.  Let  us  not  too  readily  forget  that 
most  of  our  finest  poets  were  freed  from  the 
need  of  making  money,  or  following  a  settled 
occupation,  by  the  possession  of  small 
fortunes.  It  is  because  I  see  for  woman  a 
function  other  than  the  industrial,  because 
I  do  not  think  her  especially  efficient 
industrially,  and  because  I  think  her  wasted 
as  a  labourer  that  I  am  willing  to  contem- 
plate for  her  an  idleness  which  will  profit 
the  State. 

There  are,  it  is  true,  occupations  where 
woman  excels,  and  I  do  not  want  to  debar 
her  from  any  occupation.  I  will  not,  in 
this  chapter,  contradict  anything  I  have 
said  in  others,  lay  down  that  in  a  Feminist 
society  woman  would  live  without  directly 
producing  commodities  or  rendering  services. 
I  want  to  open  all  occupations  to  her,  for 
the  usual  Feminist  reason  that  any  limit 
set  upon  the  ambition  of  any  woman,  how- 
ever misguided,  is  degrading  and  depraving. 
But  I  do  not  see  why  she  should  use  all 
her  liberties.  Let  me  quote  a  second  time 


WOMAN   AND   LABOUR 

the  instance  of  the  landlord  who  may,  under 
his  covenant  with  a  railway  company,  stop 
certain  trains  as  they  pass  certain  points  :  he 
does  not  stop  trains,  but  he  may  do  so.  It 
is  the  power  makes  him  strong,  not  the 
exercise  of  the  power;  and  this  is  a  little 
what  I  want  for  women. 

I  am  aware  that  a  thesis  such  as  this  is 
open  to  attack,  on  the  part  of  women  as 
well  as  on  that  of  men,  that  critics  may 
look  upon  it  as  an  invitation  to  women  to 
become  social  parasites.  It  may  be  sug- 
gested that  for  women  to  receive,  by  right, 
a  proportion  of  the  male  community's 
production  is  more  degrading,  because 
more  parasitic,  than  the  present  condition 
of  idleness  and  feeding  by  favour.  I  do 
not  think  this  a  very  dangerous  charge,  if 
it  be  accepted  that  women  are  physically 
incapable  of  performing  with  impunity  the 
tasks  to  which  they  are  set  to-day. 
"  Parasitic  "  is,  after  all,  a  relative  term,  for 
we  value  the  oak  and  not  the  mistletoe 
.  .  .  but  if  we  happened  to  value  the 
mistletoe  more  than  the  oak,  say  in  days 
when  iron  had  completely  driven  wood 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

out  of  trade,  then  the  mistletoe  would 
cease  to  be  a  parasite,  and  the  oak  would 
be  merely  the  soil  in  which  the  mistletoe 
grew.  That  is  a  purely  philosophic  argu- 
ment, but,  as  I  am  no  sophist,  it  can  be 
carried  into  the  practical  field.  The  Socialist 
looks  upon  the  footman,  the  landlord,  the 
stockbroker  as  parasites :  for  the  duke  the 
labour  leader  is  a  man  who  earns  a  fat 
living  by  swindling  muddle-headed  work- 
men. To  say,  therefore,  that  women  are 
or  would  be  parasitic,  amounts  to  saying 
nothing  more  than  "  in  my  particular 
opinion,  formed  in  particular  circumstances, 
parasitism  is  evident." 

To-day  a  number  of  women  are  willing 
to  be  "  parasites  " ;  that  is,  at  least,  how 
their  emancipated  sisters  too  readily  de- 
scribe them,  for  I  have  shown  in  the 
chapter  dealing  with  the  Home  that  the 
appearance  of  idleness  conceals  a  large 
amount  of  futile  but  arduous  labour. 
Many,  however,  have  resolved  to  "live 
their  own  lives,"  to  enter  the  ranks  of 
labour,  to  be  considered  and  treated  as 
men.  It  is  an  ambition  with  which  I  have 
136 


WOMAN    AND   LABOUR 

full  sympathy,  for  it  reveals  the  dawning  in 
woman  of  a  personal  tendency  which  has 
obscured  her  sex  tendency.  So  far  as  it 
leads  to  the  conquest  of  her  new  status  it 
is  excellent,  but  I  wish  to  consider  this 
revolt  against  "  parasitism  "  rather  as  an 
instrument  than  as  a  result.  It  does  not 
matter  very  much,  at  present,  whether 
women  are  right  or  wrong  in  this  particular 
demand,  for  they  have  before  them  time 
enough  to  make  mistakes,  which  they  can 
set  right ;  indeed,  it  will  be  good  if  they 
make  mistakes — this  will  prevent  them 
from  making  them  later  on.  To  conquer 
anything  at  all  they  must  be  greedy  and 
active,  for  "  inactivity  paralyses  or  ener- 
vates, petrifies  or  softens."  *  I  must  allow 
for  this  modern  tendency,  while  discounting 
it ;  I  do  not  believe  that  all  the  girls  who 
desert  their  fathers'  homes  to  enter  factories 
and  shops  do  so  because  they  want  to  be 
free  ;  they  go  because  they  must  live  and 
are  rebelling  against  domestic  service,  or 
because  they  need  pocket-money  which  the 

*  "  Le  Roman  d'un  Revolte,"  by  Albert  Postel  du 
Mas. 

137  K 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

father  cannot  give  them.  They  are  prisoners 
escaping  to  new  gaols,  rather  than  conscious 
rebels. 

The  position  of  well-to-do  young  women 
is  not  quite  the  same.  They  need  not 
work  to  live,  and  the  paternal  hand  does 
not  always  lie  very  heavy  upon  them ;  yet 
many  are  in  revolt  against  the  futility  of 
their  lives,  unwilling  to  remain  pretty  toys, 
to  play  games  and  pay  calls  until  a  man 
provides  the  "  new  gaol  "  of  their  class.  A 
number  of  these  women  view  the  University 
degree  or  the  craft  as  a  means  of  justifying 
their  existence,  honestly  believe  that  they 
must  eat  their  bread  by  the  sweat  of  their 
brow.  They  must  be  taken  into  account, 
for  they  are  leading  their  class,  preaching 
a  new  gospel  to  the  girls  who  are  entering 
the  scholastic  profession  or  the  Civil  Service 
merely  to  escape  from  home.  They 
demand,  and  because  they  demand,  must 
have  the  fullest  scope  for  their  activity. 
They  may  become  a  genus  apart,  for  a 
time,  then  the  principal  among  women 
whom  they  have  taught,  and  it  is  necessary 
that  we  should  consider  how  they  may  be 
138 


WOMAN   AND  LABOUR 

satisfied.  I  do  not  think  that  labour  is 
good  for  them,  but  I  do  not  see  why  they 
should  not  have  it :  there  is  no  reason  to 
refuse  people  a  thing  because  it  is  not  good 
for  them  ;  it  is  better  to  give  it  them,  let 
them  suffer  and  learn.  Small  boys  should 
have  green  apples  until  they  find  out  that 
they  give  them  a  pain. 

I  should  point  out,  before  saying  in  what 
direction  woman  is  likely  to  expand,  that  I 
am  striving  to  show  a  Feminist  vision  which 
is  not  limited  by  the  form  of  society  we 
know.  There  are  not  many  who  will  to- 
day assert  that  our  conditions  are  fixed ; 
indeed,  we  see  them  becoming  more  and 
more  socialistic,  we  see  trusts  form,  trades 
organise,  the  State  become  aggressive,  and 
races  even  show  signs  of  race-consciousness. 
I  cannot  predict  what  the  next  form  will 
be — more  or  less  socialistic,  probably,  but  it 
cannot  be  the  ultimate  form  ;  there  is  some- 
thing beyond  socialism  to  be  born  of  revolt 
when  organisation  has  done  its  work,  given 
us  the  social  conscience  we  lack;  that 
must  be  a  voluntary  organisation,  where 
the  social  conscience  will  have  superseded 
'39 


WOMAN    AND   TO-MORROW 

authority.  And  beyond  .  .  .  but  that  is 
far  enough.  Because  of  these  vast  changes 
it  must  be  understood  that  many  of  these 
indications  apply  mainly  to  transitory  states. 
Typical  of  a  transitory  state  is  the  proposal 
that  women  should  be  entitled  to  a  propor- 
tion of  men's  incomes  and  wages ;  typical 
of  a  new  but  equally  transitory  state  is 
the  suggestion  that  they  should  have  a 
"  parasitic "  lien  on  the  earnings  of  the 
community  ;  typical  also  of  transitory  con- 
ditions is  the  demand  for  the  endowment 
of  motherhood. 

While  I  look  upon  the  lien  on  wages 
and  the  endowment  of  motherhood  as 
immediately  necessary,  I  intend  to  consider 
trade  monopolies  as  a  more  distant  step. 
There  are  trades  which  must,  in  that  more 
collectivist  condition,  become  the  monopoly 
of  women,  practically  by  right  of  conquest ; 
these  are  chiefly  nursing,  teaching,  and  such 
clerical  work  as  may  survive.  Domestic 
service  will  then  have  almost  disappeared 
and  will  be  mainly  mechanical,  while  I 
exclude  the  manufacture  of  clothing,  an 
industry  where  fancy  must  become  personal 
140 


WOMAN    AND    LABOUR 


and  will  not  be  purchasable,  for  individual 
wealth  will  be  lacking  to  buy  it,  while  the 
demand  for  u  ready-to-wear "  goods  in- 
creases. These  are  elementary  conquests, 
and  all  that  will  be  required  is  that  they 
should  be  regulated,  so  that  the  female 
Frankenstein  may  not  be  devoured.  It 
is  very  inspiring  to  think  that  the  natural 
aptitudes  of  woman  will  earn  their  full  play, 
and  I  do  not  suppose  that  any  will  deny 
that,  notably,  nursing  and  teaching  appeal 
to  woman's  genius.  Teaching,  especially, 
appears  to  me  to  be  particularly  within 
her  realm,  for  it  demands  concentration, 
obstinacy,  and  patience,  all  of  which  (and 
this  is  important)  are  qualities  of  resistance 
rather  than  action. 

Where  resistance  rather  than  action  is 
required,  there  will  the  woman  be.  The 
creative  demand  must  not  be  made  upon 
her :  if,  as  I  believe,  she  possesses  the 
creative  spirit,  it  will  manifest  itself  un- 
helped  when  general  conditions  allow  of 
its  expansion.  Meanwhile,  in  the  trades 
she  may  conquer,  woman  must  be  protected 
against  her  own  enthusiasm  by  the  usual 
141 


WOMAN   AND  TO-MORROW 

economic  machinery,  i.e.,  i.  Minimum  wages, 
2.  Limitation  of  hours  of  labour.  I  will  not 
here  discuss  the  minimum  wage ;  it  can  be 
established  even  in  competitive  trades  with 
or  without  the  help  of  a  tariff,  and  I  am  not 
suggesting  that  women  will  enter  the  com- 
petitive trades  ;  there  would  be  no  difficulty, 
for  instance,  in  raising  the  salary  of  a 
schoolmistress  from  £100  a  year  to  ^150. 
The  rivalry  of  man,  the  only  one  which 
would  be  possible,  falls  to  the  ground  if 
my  assumption  of  feminine  monopolies  is 
accepted.  Limitation  of  hours  is  already 
accepted,  for  it  is  applied  in  shops,  factories, 
and  mines,  and  already  differences  exist  in 
the  law  between  men,  women,  and  young 
persons.  I  want  to  "  steep  up  "  the  dis- 
tinction and  establish  that  if  a  woman  is 
employed  in  a  trade  where  men  work,  say 
ten  hours,  she  shall  work  six.  Under  our 
present  system  this  would  drive  women  out 
of  the  trade,  but  the  provision  is  applicable 
only  as  the  social  system  adjusts  itself  and 
as  common  profits  become  important,  while 
individual  advantage  vanishes.  It  will 
tend,  also,  to  thrust  women  into  monopoly 
142 


WOMAN   AND   LABOUR 

trades,    while    clearing     the     ground     for 
men. 

I  said  above  that,  by  right  of  conquest, 
nursing,  teaching,  and  clerical  work  would 
fall  into  the  hands  of  woman,  but  that  is 
almost  in  sight.  There  are  two  other 
branches  where  woman  must  expand  and 
where  she  may  acquire  a  monopoly;  the 
one  comprises  the  crafts,  the  other  may 
be  called  administrative.  The  best-known 
craftsmen  are  at  present  men,  but  the  crafts 
are  narrowly  viewed,  and  many  who  are  by 
their  work  entitled  to  call  themselves  crafts- 
men are  included  in  the  working-class.  It 
should  be  accepted  that  any  person  is  a 
craftsman  who  by  means  of  his  hands 
creates  the  beautiful  rather  than  the  useful. 
Are  craftsmen,  therefore,  in  the  broader 
sense  those,  who  make  and  set  up  designs 
for  printing  and  reproduction,  who  paint 
pottery  for  glazing,  who  work  with  stencils, 
who  make  the  cards  which  regulate  the 
patterns  of  fabrics,  etc.  It  will  be  realised 
at  once  that  this  is  an  enormous  field.  As 
you  read  these  lines  consider  the  objects  in 
the  room  round  you  :  almost  every  one  of 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

them  has  (more  or  less)  been  decorated  by 
the  human  hand  ;  door-handles,  table-cloth 
and  carpet-patterns,  picture-frames,  the 
design  of  the  cover  of  the  book  you  hold, 
all  these  things  are  the  work  of  craftsmen 
behind  the  machines. 

I  believe  that  women  have  as  often,  if 
not  more  often  than  men,  the  craftsman's 
temperament ;  since  1880  especially  their 
progress  in  wood,  leather,  and  metal-work 
has  been  remarkable,  as  is  shown  by  the 
exhibitions  which  are  continually  held,  at 
the  Lyceum  Club,  at  the  minor  art  galleries, 
even  in  the  parish  rooms  of  the  villages. 
The  new  craftswomen  are  emerging  from 
Glasgow  and  Camden  Town,  they  are  illus- 
trating books,  selling  less  little  bags  and 
entering  more  factories;  being  cheap, 
efficient  and  sufficiently  inventive,  there  is 
reason  to  think  that  they  will  slowly  release 
for  rougher  work  men  who  have  no  creative 
instinct  but  are  wasting  their  muscles  on 
pencils  and  paintbrushes.  Crafts,  as  the 
minor  and  industrial  arts,  are  likely  there- 
fore to  absorb  much  of  the  energies  of 
many  hundreds  of  thousands  of  women, 


WOMAN  AND   LABOUR 

and  I  incline  to  think  that  this  will  affect 
the  general  artistic  capacity  of  woman,  by 
giving  her  the  elementary  training  by  favour 
of  which  her  gifts  will  develop.  Beyond 
craftsmanship,  which  I  look  upon  as  the 
next  step,  there  is  the  broader  field  of  ad- 
ministration, which  need  not  detain  us  very 
long,  because  it  is  one  as  to  which  we  can 
generalise  only  from  the  feminine  tempera- 
ment. 

It  can  be  said  broadly  that  man's  capacity 
is  executive  rather  than  administrative,  that 
he  is  better  in  his  place  in  the  sheriffs 
posse  than  in  the  sheriffs  office,  because 
the  exuberance  of  his  body  demands  of  him 
that  he  should  expend  strength,  while 
woman  tends  rather  to  store  energy  in  her 
cells  to  assist  the  subtle  creative  schemes  of 
nature.  For  this  reason  I  feel  that  the 
portion  of  executive  work  known  as  ad- 
ministration, i.e.,  storekeeping  and  time- 
keeping, the  making  of  records,  the  pre- 
paration of  statistics,  the  organisation 
of  labour  and  the  distribution  of  com- 
modities, all  those  tasks  which  are  mainly 
static,  are  not  well  executed  by  men  stolen 
M-5 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

from  the  anvil  and  the  plough.  Woman 
has  the  essential  taste  for  detail  and  the 
personal  interest  in  persons  which  can  make 
administration  vital  and  useful.  One  in- 
stance will  suffice.  A  man,  controlling  as 
timekeeper  a  thousand  persons,  will  edict 
that  they  must  reach  the  factory  at  eight ; 
a  woman's  tendency  will  be  to  inquire 
where  they  live  and  to  ask :  Can  they 
reach  the  factory  at  eight  without  undue 
inconvenience?  If  inquiry  shows  that  they 
cannot,  it  is  she  will  agitate  in  favour  of 
cheap  tramways,  for  instance. 

This  is  a  small  but  significant  instance  ; 
I  feel  generally  that  the  broad  conclusions 
men  are  apt  to  draw  nullify  the  value  of 
humanitarian  regulations ;  they  have  be- 
come accustomed  to  seeing  things  writ 
large,  they  cannot  realise  the  particular 
case.  Now  women  have  for  so  many  gener- 
ations been  trained  to  cope  with  the  minor 
difficulties  of  the  household  and  with  the 
varying  temperaments  of  its  inmates,  that 
they  have  become  infinitely  more  subtle : 
I  have  never  heard  that  a  woman  adminis- 
trator was  the  slave  of  red-tape ;  having 
146 


WOMAN    AND    LABOUR 

little  respect  for  law,  because  they  are 
essentially  individualists,  they  are  the 
people  who  must  interpret  the  law.  It  may 
be  that  I  shall  shock  many  by  saying  that, 
on  a  capital  charge,  I  would  rather  be  tried 
by  a  jury  of  women  than  by  a  jury  of  men  : 
men  as  we  know  them  might  appreciate  the 
facts  more  fully,  but  motives  would  mean 
nothing  to  them  ;  they  are  not  subtle,  and 
apply  the  law  as  they  would  apply  a 
steam-roller.  In  all  those  walks  of  life, 
therefore,  where  a  nice  appreciation  of  the 
details  of  government  is  wanted,  in  the 
public  service,  in  the  factory,  the  office,  I 
look  forward  to  a  great  extension  of  female 
labour.  It  will  be  one  of  the  least  harmful 
forms  of  labour,  for  it  will  not  ruin  the 
body,  and  it  will  keep  mental  faculties  on 
the  alert. 

Lastly,  and  in  any  state,  however  ad- 
vanced, I  think  woman  must  extend  her 
role  as  a  trainer  and  educator  of  children. 
I  have  shown  in  "  Feminism  and  the 
Home  "  that  an  evolution  of  the  household 
is  certain,  but  it  would  be  doing  the  work 
of  a  visionary  to  say  that  the  home  will 
H7 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

disappear  entirely.  Some  form  of  human 
association  must  remain  unless  men  are 
born  again,  and  I  think  we  can  safely 
dismiss  such  wild  ideas  as  generation  under 
official  auspices,  separate  barracks  for  men 
and  women,  etc.  The  tendency  of  lovers 
has  immemorially  been  to  coalesce,  to  build 
a  nest  which  they  share  with  their  offspring, 
and  the  tendency  is  as  strong  among  the 
Nietzscheans  as  among  the  birds.  Here 
and  there  is  a  rebel,  who  will  live  alone, 
but  he  is  negligible,  as  is  among  the  birds 
the  one  exception  of  the  piratical  cuckoo. 
That  women  will  continue  to  rear  their 
young  as  they  do  now  in  hostile  isolation, 
reluctantly  yielding  them  up  to  the  school 
and  watching  over  their  social  relationships, 
I  do  not  think.  There  are  already  many 
thousands  of  women  on  Care  Committees, 
women  who  conduct  creches,  children's 
hospitals,  relief  societies ;  it  is  women 
support  the  National  Society  for  the  Pre- 
vention of  Cruelty  to  Children :  that  is  the 
spirit  the  Feminist  State  will  develop.  It 
will  be  no  longer  "  My  Child  and  I  (against 
the  world),"  but  "  The  Children  and  I." 
148 


WOMAN   AND   LABOUR 

I  do  not  suppose  indeed  that  the  gregarious 
spirit  of  our  age,  so  weak  by  the  side  of 
the  collectivism  we  must  pass  through,  will 
spare  the  sensitive  feminine  brain;  if,  living 
as  they  do  in  uncivilised  conditions,  they 
already  show  such  love  and  such  tolerance, 
when  their  road  has  been  cleared  we  must 
find  that  women  will  band  themselves 
together  in  small  groups,  say  of  a  dozen, 
to  administer  what  may  be  called  private 
creches,  where  children  can  be  tended, 
fed,  amused  in  common.  The  net  result 
will  be  that  some  of  the  burden  of  child- 
rearing  will  be  lifted  from  the  shoulders 
of  the  mother,  for  it  stands  to  reason  that 
while  it  takes  one  mother  to  amuse  one 
child,  it  does  not  take  ten  mothers  to 
amuse  ten  children. 

The  effect  upon  the  mother  will  be 
relief  from  labour.  The  effect  upon  the 
child  will  be  that  it  grows  up  less  unsoci- 
able, and  yet  more  individualistic.  On  the 
one  hand  the  intelligent  mother  will  more 
readily  throw  her  child  into  contact  with 
other  children,  free  it  from  nervousness  and 
teach  it  to  be  tolerant :  for  it  is  a  common- 
149 


WOMAN    AND   TO-MORROW 

place  to  say  that  it  is  not  good  for  a  child 
to  grow  up  alone  ;  on  the  other  it  will  be 
more  individualistic  because  it  will  have  to 
assert  itself.  To-day  the  child  finds  the 
path  too  easy  :  an  admirer  is  ready  in  the 
home  to  rave,  as  Mr.  Polly  found,  over 
the  beauty  of  its  toes ;  it  is  bitterly 
disillusioned,  as  was  Mr.  Polly,  when  it 
discovers  later  that  the  world  does  not 
rave  over  the  beauty  of  its  toes.  In  the 
Feminist  creche  it  will  have  to  justify 
itself,  it  will  have  to  "  show-off." 

I  am  all  for  "  showing-off."  Such  ex- 
cellence as  feminine  teaching  has  already 
is  found  in  the  taste  women  have  for  de- 
veloping the  personal  faculties  of  children  ; 
it  is  women  make  the  child  "speak  a  piece," 
or  do  tricks  on  the  trapeze ;  it  is  they 
listen  to  its  amateur  stories  and  to  the 
doggerel  it  likes  to  compose.  They  do 
not  stifle  it  in  the  heavy  mantle  of  good 
form,  and  for  this  reason  I  hope  and  believe 
that  women  will  retain  a  hold  upon  their 
children  until  their  education  is  ended. 
Feminism  cannot  co-exist  with  the  tradition 
of  stupidity  and  brutality  exemplihed  by 


WOMAN   AND   LABOUR 

the  public  schools  ;  it  cannot  allow  boys  to 
be  brought  up  in  the  idea  that  girls  are 
their  inferiors,  that  Winchester  "  notions  " 
are  enough  for  its  elect  and  that  the  Harrow 
straw  hat  is  the  best  hat.  All  that  must 
go,  with  the  tradition  of  masculine  tyranny, 
and  it  will  be  one  of  the  first  functions 
of  Feminism  to  procure  its  downfall. 

I  believe,  therefore,  that  in  the  care  of 
children  the  new-woman  will  still  find  her 
chief  occupation.  However  far  the  extension 
of  machinery  and  the  refinements  of 
Government  may  carry  us,  the  baby  will 
still  have  to  be  washed,  the  child  told  that 
it  must  not  swing  the  kitten  by  its  tail. 
On  the  lines  I  have  indicated  the  work 
will  no  longer  be  ungrateful,  but  will  pro- 
mote among  women  the  social  intercourse 
by  favour  of  which  they  can  develop  and 
become  finer  mothers  as  well  as  finer 
women.  From  that  particular  labour  they 
will  never  be  free  ;  at  least  I  can  conceive 
no  state  of  society  where  men  will  assume 
responsibility  for  the  care  of  children. 
They  have  never  done  so,  so  far,  except 
as  medical  men,  and  have  avoided  the  child 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

in  its  early  stages  ;  if  they  have  preserved 
for  themselves  the  education  of  growing 
boys  it  is  largely  because  they  despised 
women,  and  instinctively  felt  that,  to  main- 
tain the  supremacy  of  their  sex,  they  had 
to  make  the  boy  the  father  of  the  man. 
But  now  they  are  being  driven  out,  partly 
because  they  are  not  relatively  so  strong 
as  they  were,  partly  because  they  are  more 
reasonable  and  are  beginning  to  understand 
that  their  task  lies  in  the  open,  in  the 
struggle  for  life  and  wealth,  rather  than 
in  the  reposeful  places  where  youth  is  slowly 
being  armed  for  the  contest  which  is  to 
come.  Men  no  longer  hold  the  children's 
hospital ;  they  have  never  held  the  kinder- 
garten, even  though  a  man  created  it ;  they 
are  minor  influences  in  co-education,  and 
already  in  Council  Schools  they  are  giving 
way  before  the  trained  and  intuitive  women. 
I  see  this  as  woman's  natural  field,  and  I 
do  not  think  Feminists  will  rest  until  the 
whole  of  education,  from  cradle  to  career, 
has  been  placed  in  their  predestined  hands. 
Such,  then,  is  the  course  of  the  Feminist 
labour  movement,  as  I  perceive  it.  I  have 


WOMAN    AND    LABOUR 

had  to  describe  it  with  some  regret,  holding 
as  I  do  the  view  expressed  early  in  this 
chapter  that  woman  is  not  as  an  animal 
destined  for  aught  save  instinctive  labour, 
such  as  child-rearing  and  artistry.  I  realise 
that  it  is  necessary  she  should  pass  through 
the  other  stages,  partly  because  she  wants 
to,  or  thinks  she  wants  to,  partly  because  she 
needs  the  discipline  and  education  that 
labour  gives ;  it  does  not,  perhaps,  matter 
much  whether  much  beauty  and  much  life 
be  sacrificed  in  the  process,  for  every  genera- 
tion bears  its  splendid  crop ;  the  new 
generation,  still  far-swathed  in  Time,  may 
be  of  another  stamp.  Its  mothers  will 
have  gained  for  it  liberty  and  freedom  of 
the  mind,  suffered  for  it,  so  as  to  be 
able  to  teach  it  to  fill  in  the  new  com- 
munity the  place  which  I  think  it  should 
fill.  I  want  woman  in  the  ultimate  state 
to  be  considered  as  something  more  than  a 
producer  of  commodities,  to  be  justified  in 
her  consumption  of  the  food  she  does  not 
tear  from  the  soil  by  the  fact  that  as  a 
woman  she  is  the  temple  of  the  race.  As 
a  temple  she  is  entitled  to  her  worshippers, 
153  L 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

and  as  a  temple  she  must  be  decorated ; 
she  must  be  physically  splendid  so  that  the 
race  may  be  splendid;  she  must  be  freed 
from  toil  so  that  her  mind  may  become 
more  aloof,  more  aristocratic  by  detach- 
ment from  the  grosser  cares,  so  that  she 
may  give  the  child  the  fine  pre-natal 
influence  of  a  sensitive  soul ;  she  must  be 
the  one  who  understands  and  fosters,  even 
if  she  does  not  practise  the  arts.  As  it 
would  be  a  bad  thing  for  the  State  as  we 
know  it  if  there  were  no  leisured  people 
endowed  by  fortune  and  able  to  think,  to 
speculate,  to  love  and  to  pursue  beauty, 
so  would  it  be  bad  in  another  State  if  both 
sexes  were  bound  to  the  wheel  of  production 
and  if  there  were  none  to  hold  high  the 
torch  which  sheds  upon  the  world  the 
radiance  of  the  arts.  Mother  and  artist, 
that  is  what  I  want  woman  ultimately  to 
be,  no  more,  and  that  is  very  much. 


VI 
WOMAN    AND    PASSION 


VI 
WOMAN   AND   PASSION 

IF  woman  is  unhappy  in  her  home,  her 
art  and  her  trade,  it  cannot  so  abso- 
lutely be  said  that  she  is  unhappy  in 
her  loves.  She  is  in  a  degraded  condition, 
but  it  is  debatable  whether  degradation 
matters  where  passion  is ;  while  we  can 
love  that  which  we  despise,  we  can  also 
rejoice  in  our  own  subjection  and  greedily 
demand  that  further  indignities  be  heaped 
on  our  head,  so  that  we  may  more  utterly 
show  how  we  love,  enjoy  martyrdom  for 
the  sake  oi  the  thing  loved.  This  applies 
very  much  to  women  and  somewhat  to 
men ;  while  men  deliver  themselves  into 
slavery  with  a  sense  of  gladness  only  when 
their  senses  are  stirred,  and  remain  slaves 
only  so  long  as  their  senses  are  held, 
women  often  appear  to  welcome  whole- 
heartedly the  thrall  of  sex,  the  dominance 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

of  a  harder  brain,  tyranny,  neglect,  insult, 
blows.  So  obscure  is  the  tendency,  which 
I  will  not  call  instinct,  that  I  lay  down  the 
ideas  that  follow  in  a  shrinking  spirit,  and 
only  because  I  believe  that  passion  can  be 
made  more  splendid  if  it  is  stripped  of  its 
load  of  social  cruelties.  It  will  always  be 
open  to  those  lovers  who  are  essential 
masochists  to  submit  gladly  to  a  personal 
thrall :  Feminists  are  not  concerned  with 
conditions  so  individual,  but  with  the 
general  state  of  woman  in  her  sex-relation 
to  man. 

Whether  woman  live  in  a  passionate  re- 
lation or  be  merely  expectant,  the  social 
conditions  under  which  we  exist  tend  to 
make  ugly  that  which  should  be  beautiful. 
Whether  a  woman  be  a  spinster,  young  or 
old,  a  wife  or  a  widow,  whether  she  be  rich 
or  poor,  varying  laws  and  pressures  work 
towards  the  starvation  of  her  fineness  or 
its  diversion  into  channels  which  are  some- 
times sentimental  and  sometimes  mercenary. 
Most  notable  is  the  state  of  the  spinster, 
because  most  abnormal.  Our  singular 
customs  lay  down  that  while  millions  of 
158 


WOMAN    AND   PASSION 

women  are  without  mates,  millions  of  men 
who  live  in  solitude  may  not  approach 
them  ;  we  drive  the  men  to  a  horrible  ex- 
pedient, the  women  into  the  bitterness  of 
lonely  age.  It  seems  that  a  majority  of 
the  white  race  consider  it  well  that  women 
should  suffer  thus  in  honour  of  a  nebu- 
lous ideal  that  they  call  chastity  ;  so  con- 
vinced are  they  of  the  Tightness  of  this, 
that  social  ostracism  follows  on  an  infringe- 
ment of  the  social  law.  It  is  an  ex- 
traordinary state  of  things,  and  I  would  ask 
the  reader  to  ignore  the  few  thousands  of 
rich  or  artistic  women  who  can,  in  the 
great  towns,  afford  to  dispense  with 
marriage,  and  survive  the  effects  of  divorce 
and  illegitimate  children ;  they  do  not 
count  in  a  general  question  by  the  side  of 
the  millions  of  women  who  have  been 
taught  to  be  "  straight "  and  can  hardly 
imagine  themselves  as  anything  but 
"  straight." 

It  would  be  easy  to  make  great  play  with 
the  figures  of  the  Census,  to  ask  what  is 
to  become  of  the  spinsters,  but  it  is  more 
effective  to  take  the  case  of  one  spinster 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

in  her  father's  house.  If  she  be  young  and 
moderately  attractive  she  is  in  an  attitude 
of  expectancy ;  possibly  she  works  and 
earns  a  sum  which  will  not  keep  her;  or 
she  does  not  work,  but  is  kept.  I  have 
reviewed  her  position  as  a  home-slave,  but 
how  does  she  fare  in  the  light  of  her 
passionate  needs  ?  I  assume  these  needs, 
for  most  women  possess  them,  and  know 
that  they  are  not  satisfied.  The  spinster 
has  suffered  from  puberty  onwards,  perhaps 
for  years  ;  she  has  suffered  obscurely,  but 
there  has  been  no  illusion  about  it,  and  she 
may  be  fated  to  suffer  for  twenty  or  thirty 
years.  She  is  kept,  protected,  but  on  the 
terms  that  she  shall  give  herself  only  in 
marriage  ;  she  may  do  all  that  can  be  done 
to  entrap  man,  but  "  she  must  not  go  too 
far."  If  she  succeeds  she  passes  into  the 
married  class,  to  face  new  problems  ;  if  she 
fails  she  may  suffer,  physically  and  mentally, 
lose  her  beauty,  become  the  ridiculous  mass 
of  ingratiating  giggles  which  provides  jokes 
for  the  music-halls,  but  she  must  uphold 
still  and  forever  the  white  flag  of  chastity. 
The  reason  is  not  far  to  seek ;  man,  in  his 
160 


WOMAN    AND    PASSION 

concern  for  his  race,  which  is  not  concern 
for  the  race,  wishes,  in  the  words  of  Mr. 
H.  G.  Wells,  "  to  have  all  his  own  women 
inviolate,  and  to  fancy  he  has  a  call  upon 
every  other  woman  in  the  world."  *  So 
clear  is  the  idea  of  property  that  John  will 
assault  Henry  because  the  latter  has  made 
to  John's  sister  a  proposal  which  John 
would  not  hesitate  to  make  to  Henry's. 

There  exists  in  the  world  an  insane  idea 
that  women  have  no  sexual  needs,  while  a 
man  almost  requires  a  wife  in  every  port. 
There  is  great  talk  of  encouraging  women 
to  emigrate  to  the  Colonies,  so  that  the 
settlers  may  have  wives,  and  there  is  none 
of  providing  husbands  for  spinsters.  I  do 
not  know  to  what  extent  men  believe 
this,  and  to  what  extent  they  choose  to 
believe  it  for  reasons  which  are  not  very 
clear.  Why  men  should  value  virginity  in 
women  has  never  been  demonstrated,  for 
they  do  not,  as  a  rule,  deliberately  want  to 
have  children  ;  they  are  oppressed  by 
some  obscure  desire  to  initiate,  probably 
out  of  vainglory.  They  cannot  answer  the 

*  "The  New  Machiavelli." 
161 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

argument  that  a  woman  is  no  less  desirable 
because  she  has  known  passion,*  or  explain 
why  they  do  not  hesitate  to  marry  widows ; 
the  answer  they  sometimes  make,  that  a 
woman  who  has  "  sinned  "  out  of  wedlock 
will  "  sin  "  when  wed,  is  not  very  sound,  for 
they  apply  it  in  cases  where  there  was  but  a 
single  "  sin,"  possibly  under  promise  of 
marriage.  It  is  mainly  male  egoism  that 
dictates  their  feeling,  the  unreasoning  sense 
of  property  in  women. 

If  the  spinster  live  alone,  if  she  have 
means,  then  the  penalties  of  expulsion  from 
the  home  are  reduced  to  social  ostracism, 
that  engine  so  admirably  calculated  to 
ruin  finally  those  to  whom  it  is  applied 
in  a  spirit  of  piety.  Man  substitutes  for 
personal  property  in  certain  women  a  share 
in  a  collective  sex-property ;  he  will  not  fail 
to  observe  the  woman's  "  fall,"  and  to  profit 
by  her  weakness,  but  will  thrust  her  away 
from  his  own  women,  on  whom  he  hasimposed 
a  "  stainless  life."  And  if  we  consider  the 
widow,  her  position  is  still  more  ludicrous  and 
pathetic,  for  she  has  known  companionship 
*  See  "  Sanine,"  by  Artzybachev. 
162 


WOMAN    AND   PASSION 

and  sex-intercourse ;  yet  she  is  to  be 
thrust  back  into  spinsterhood  after  having 
escaped  it,  or  forfeit  her  reputation.  To 
so  remarkable  a  pitch  has  this  been  carried 
that  surprise  is  not  general  when  a  Colonel 
Astor  leaves  a  vast  fortune  to  his  wife 
provided  she  do  not  re-marry:  apparently 
a  wife  is  one  of  the  few  properties  a  man 
may  control  after  his  death. 

The  position  of  the  married  woman  is 
different  in  essentials,  for  here  we  have  no 
longer  a  deprivation  of  sex-intercourse,  but 
the  more  complicated  question  of  venality. 
It  is  hardly  too  much  to  say  that  in  a  great 
number  of  cases  marriage  is  a  form  of  barter, 
for  the  monetary  element,  while  looming 
very  large  during  the  engagement,  tends  to 
become  predominant  when  love  has  run 
its  course.  It  is  within  the  knowledge  of  all 
of  us  that  many  women  unwillingly  tolerate 
their  husband's  habitual  misconduct  because 
they  are  penniless ;  they  cannot  leave  him 
because  they  have  no  trade,  or  no  desire  to 
earn  a  livelihood.  I  do  not  argue  that  all 
marriages  are  venal ;  at  least,  the  majority 
cannot  be  priced  in  cash;  other  advantages, 
163 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

such  as  "  status  "  or  "  position,"  must  be 
taken  into  account,  and  intervene  largely  in 
match-making.  In  this  country  marriages 
are  probably  less  venal  than  in  any  other 
white  man's  land,  except  America,  where 
divorce  facilities  have  made  them  still  more 
sexo-sentimental  than  in  England.  But  it 
would  be  wrong  to  think  that  because 
love-matches  are  common  the  manage  de 
convenance  is  uncommon  ;  it  does  not  un- 
duly ravage  the  aristocracy  and  the  working- 
class,  but  it  exercises  its  sway  in  a  large 
proportion  of  middle-class  alliances. 

Generally  speaking,  among  the  well-to-do 
the  men  are  in  love,  so  far  as  they  can  be 
in  love — which  is  not  always  very  much — 
but  the  women  are  at  best  willing.  A  little 
emotion,  a  faint  preference  suffices,  as  a 
rule,  to  convince  the  young  woman  that  the 
eligible  young  man  (with  so  many  hundreds 
a  year)  who  has  paid  her  flattering  atten- 
tions is  her  predestined  lover;  she  is  not 
consciously  venal,  she  does  not  enter  the 
married  state  in  fear  and  repulsion.  She 
accepts  that  she  must  accept  this  passable 
man,  so  that  she  may  be  kept  by  one  other 
164 


WOMAN    AND    PASSION 

than  her  father ;  without  impulse  towards 
him  she  is  ready  to  be  his  lover  and  to  bear 
his  children.  This  tepidity  is  not  worthy 
of  the  name  of  passion,  yet  serves  as  a 
substitute ;  it  would  not  be  objectionable 
if  it  did  not  reveal  a  low  state  of  emotional 
development  and  if  it  did  not  lead  to 
hideous  compromises.  There  is  no  doubt 
that  women  must  be  in  an  inferior  emotional 
condition  if  they  are  willing  to  offer  the 
most  intimate  of  tributes  without  being 
anxious  to  do  so.  To  replace  desire  by  self- 
abnegation  one  must  be  almost  incapable  of 
conceiving  desire,  and  as  human  desire  is 
governed  largely  by  emotion,  it  is  the  latter 
must  be  atrophied. 

I  should  not,  however,  insist  so  much  on 
the  need  for  passion  in  marriage  if  tepid 
passions  did  not  interfere  with  happiness. 
Because  it  has  been  notorious  for  so  many 
centuries  that  a  man  takes  unto  himself  a 
willing  wife,  who  gives  herself  and  takes  no 
passionate  equivalent,  it  has  been  assumed 
by  man  that  his  irregularities  must  be 
condoned.  He  has  not  stated  this  in  the 
law,  but  he  has  established  it  by  imposing 
165 


WOMAN    AND   TO-MORROW 

upon  the  married  woman  the  tyranny  of 
money.  If  a  wife  be  injured  because  her 
husband  is  unfaithful  to  her,  or  if,  as  is 
more  common,  he  be  not  unfaithful  but 
merely  repellent  as  a  mate,  she  has  no 
remedy :  if  she  desert  him  without  just 
cause  the  Courts  will  allow  her  no  alimony, 
and  the  Courts,  imbued  with  the  idea  that 
wives  must  submit  themselves  unto  their 
husbands,  will  never  recognise  physical  and 
emotional  repulsion  as  a  just  cause.  Thence 
springs  the  difficulty:  the  unemotional  girl, 
who  has  married  in  ignorance  a  man  to 
whom  she  did  not  object,  may  discover 
later  that  she  possesses  a  temperament 
opposed  to  his,  but  she  must  endure  him  ; 
matrimony  may  have  worked  in  her  a 
revolution,  but  she  cannot  free  herself  from 
the  consequences  of  deeds  done  before  she 
was  awake.  The  law  will  not  help  her  ; 
her  family,  glad  to  have  "  settled  her  nicely," 
will  hardly  receive  her  back ;  society,  male 
and  female,  will  say  that  they  "  see  nothing 
wrong  with  the  man." 

There  need  be  "  nothing  wrong  with  the 
man."     He  may  be  the  perfect  lover  and  the 
1 66 


WOMAN    AND    PASSION 

perfect  husband,  but  he  may  not  be  her 
natural  mate;  he  might  charm  other  women, 
but  repel  his  wife;  neither  party  is  to  blame! 
Yet  the  bond  must  endure  and  hideous 
things  be  done  in  its  defence.  Because 
the  man  is  the  pay-master  he  may  retain 
his  private  odalisque,  refuse  her  freedom 
and  money,  brand  her  in  Court  as  a 
neurotic  person,  hold  her  children  ;  she 
has  chosen  him  and  may  not  choose  twice. 
But  has  she  chosen  ?  ask  the  Feminists. 
Is  it  "  choice  "  when  a  young  girl  fresh 
from  school  resigns  herself  to  an  unknown 
man  ?  when  an  older  girl,  who  has  been 
sheltered  in  her  father's  home,  plunges  for 
a  half -justified  preference  ?  Neither  has 
anything  to  build  upon,  save  imagination, 
and  yet  she  must  make  a  contract  for  life. 
It  is  not  choice,  for  one  cannot  choose  unless 
one  knows;  it  is  the  practice  among  the 
well-to-do  to  exclude  as  much  as  possible 
the  "  detrimentals,"  i.e.,  those  men  whose 
means  are  not  enough,  and  this  limits  choice 
to  an  extraordinary  degree  :  there  are  many 
young  women  who,  after  having  had  friendly 
superficial  relations  with  half  a  dozen  men, 
167 


WOMAN    AND  TO-MORROW 

are  called  upon  to  choose  a  husband  ;  there 
are  many  more,  such  as  teachers,  who 
hardly  meet  any  men  at  all.  And  they  too 
may  be  called  upon  to  "  choose." 

It  is  not  wonderful,  then,  that  women 
who  choose  so  blindly  should  set  aside  the 
sex-factor;  it  ceases  to  be  the  X  of  an 
equation,  to  which  they  have  no  key.  The 
X  becomes  the  money  question  in  all  its 
forms,  and  a  woman  tends  to  ask  herself, 
not  "  do  I  love  him  ?  "  but  "  will  this  be 
a  profitable  marriage  ? "  She  cannot  be 
blamed,  she  judges  that  which  she  can 
judge,  looks,  breeding,  profession,  status, 
money ;  she  cannot  estimate  the  unknown, 
cannot  tell  whether  her  latent  passions  will 
respond  to  those  of  the  aspirant.  The 
marriage  is  consummated  ;  perhaps  it 
remains  devoid  of  all  joy,  and  the  woman 
has  missed  the  greatest  emotional  oppor- 
tunity in  her  life;  perhaps  it  is  repulsive, 
and  then  she  accepts  her  husband's  caresses 
with  a  feeling  that  may  approach  nausea. 
She  endures,  she  must  endure  :  she  has  a 
house,  money,  clothes,  and  calls,  and  a 
circle;  she  has  truly  sold  herself,  and  has  sold 
168 


WOMAN    AND    PASSION 

herself  for  life.  She  may  escape,  but  at 
great  cost.  She  must  be  very  brave,  very 
able ;  she  must  be  ready  to  earn  her  own 
living  in  the  face  of  a  hostile  world ;  she 
must  make  new  friends,  a  new  life  ;  and  few 
women  can  do  this.  Some  may  despise  her 
because  of  her  weakness,  say  that  it  is 
ignoble  that  she  should  submit  to  ignominy; 
it  is,  but  the  iniquity  is  not  on  her  :  it  is  on 
those  who  made  the  customs  and  the  laws. 
Happy,  then,  in  a  negative  sense,  are 
those  whose  passions  never  awaken,  who  are 
able  to  love,  let  us  say  adequately,  the  man 
with  whom  they  fortuitously  ally.  They 
are  not  uncommon,  for  it  is  characteristic 
of  the  slave  that  a  little  kindness  will  go  a 
long  way ;  a  woman  fresh  from  the  oppres- 
sion of  her  father  and  mother  tends  to 
think,  when  the  liberties  of  marriage  have 
been  accorded  her  (not  so  much  sex- 
liberties  as  the  liberties  which  attach  to  her 
new  status),  that  she  has  been  "pitched 
neck  and  crop  into  Paradise."  It  is  only 
later  she  may  analyse  ;  at  first  the  husband 
is  the  new  spirit,  the  magic  creature  the 
like  of  which  she  has  never  met  before. 
169  M 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

Because  she  has  never  met  him  before, 
because  he  is  strange,  she  invests  him  with 
qualities  almost  extra-human,  as  innocently 
as  Riquet  looks  upon  his  master  as  a  God.* 
Often  the  illusion  endures,  and  some  women 
may  make  decent  lives  of  this  rudimentary 
passion  ;  they  belong  to  a  low  type. 

Indifference  need  not,  however,  detain  us 
long,  for  there  is  no  passionate  problem 
where  there  is  no  passion.  The  problems  of 
marriage  are  not  entirely  physical,  for 
woman's  passion  is  not  entirely  physical ; 
it  is  too  readily  assured  by  man  that  it  is 
in  no  wise  physical,  but  he  is  right  in 
thinking  that  it  is  more  mental,  emotional 
than  his  own.  Primarily,  passion  in  woman 
is  maternal,  it  is  a  desire  to  give  which 
feeds  upon  itself  and  waxes  fat  upon  its 
giving ;  a  woman  in  love  is  vampiric  and 
exclusive,  jealous  of  all  other  women,  of 
the  lover's  mother,  sister,  daughter.  She 
wants  to  be  to  him  all  the  women  of  the 
world,  to  stand  for  every  relation  that  can 
exist  between  the  sexes.  She  wants  to 
protect  him,  to  spare  him  pain  and  trouble, 

*  "  Monsieur  Bergeret  a  Paris  "  (Anatole  France). 
170 


WOMAN    AND   PASSION 

to  be  his  friend  as  well  as  his  lover,  his 
counsellor,  his  servant  and  his  partner  ;  she 
wants  to  be  everything  that  he  wants,  and 
everything  she  has  ever  heard  of,  and  yet 
a  little  impossible  more,  to  love  him  and 
to  outstrip  love  itself  and  all  it  may 
demand  in  the  impetuous  offering  of  all  her 
faculties. 

It  is  not  wonderful,  then,  that  an  emotion 
so  broad  should  grow  slowly  and  awaken 
unwillingly,  for  I  think  it  an  axiom  that 
naught  save  small  emotions  grow  very  fast : 
a  toadstool  grows  more  quickly,  but  dies 
earlier  than  a  chestnut-tree.  Because  man 
is  sensual  and  impatient,  passion  is  often 
destroyed,  counteracted  rather  by  the 
disappointment  which  woman  feels  because 
love  unveiled  is  not  as  delicate  and  as 
beautiful  as  was  love  in  her  dreams ;  as  a 
result  many  women  whose  emotional 
possibilities  are  those  of  a  Juliet  or  a 
Francesca  go  through  life  and  marriage 
without  having  once  been  deafened  by  the 
beating  of  the  wings.  That  is  why  passion 
is  in  so  low  a  state  in  Great  Britain  and 
the  United  States,  where  jostle  puritanism 
171 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

and  brutality.  Apparently  there  is  no 
alternative:  love  must  be  looked  upon 
either  as  the  prelude  to  parenthood  or  it 
must  be  coarse,  vulgar,  or  light,  a  fit  subject 
for  the  music-halls.  Apparently  women 
must  be  divided  into  two  types  and  live 
under  two  laws,  one  for  the  mother-type,  the 
other  for  the  courtesan-type.  The  mother 
must  be  protected  and  dominated,  the 
courtesan  hunted,  enjoyed  and  despised; 
there  must  be  no  charm  in  love,  for  charm 
is  held  as  faintly  immoral,  and  immorality 
as  almost  hygienic.  It  is  a  curious  illusion, 
and  it  is  not  balanced  by  any  division  of 
men  into  types ;  we  never  hear  of  the 
father-type  and  of  the  lover-type,  though 
they  may  as  readily  be  imagined  as  the 
mother  and  the  courtesan.  Man  has  re- 
served for  woman  the  classification  by  which 
his  conscience  is  salved ;  it  is  a  false 
classification,  one  which,  at  most,  might  be 
proven  true  only  if  some  mysterious  psycho- 
physiological  instrument,  say  an  erotometer, 
could  be  built.  I  do  not  believe  that  there 
is  an  essential  difference  between  Catherine 
of  Russia  and  the  housewife  who  governs  a 
172 


WOMAN    AND    PASSION 

semi-detached  villa  in  Streatham.  Both 
are  animated  by  the  same  passion,  the 
passion  of  life-giving,  an  unconscious,  but 
dominating  passion  ;  the  modest  and 
monandrous  wife  cleaves  unto  her  husband 
while  the  courtesan  gives  all  to  every  man, 
but,  if  we  leave  out  the  monetary  element, 
one  is  inclined  to  think  that  both  are 
searching  for  the  ideal  mate  who  will  realise 
their  hopes  for  the  race.  The  race  is  their 
unconscious  preoccupation  ;  even  if  they 
flout  the  suggestion  it  must  be  maintained, 
for  woman  is  the  temple  of  the  race,  and 
she  is  its  splendid  vestal.  Indeed,  the 
courtesan,  hungrily  searching,  carries  higher 
than  the  mother  the  standard  of  the  race, 
for  she  is  rebellious  and  discriminating,  and 
she  is  out  among  a  world  of  mates  for 
adventure  and  the  service  of  those  who 
will  follow  her. 

The  pity  of  it  all!  is  the  natural  corollary 
of  these  reflections.  No  lover  of  woman 
can  think  unmoved  of  this  daily  waste  of 
magnificence.  For  it  is  magnificence,  and 
I  do  not  think  that  if  the  heroic  deeds  done 
in  the  name  of  patriotism  and  religion  were 
173 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

heaped  high  on  one  another  their  mass 
would  be  seen  by  the  side  of  the  sumptuous 
pile  of  sacrifices  and  lives  given  in  the 
name  of  love.  It  is  because  the  Feminist 
sees  love  splendid  instead  of  limited  and 
abject  that  he  wishes  to  free  it  from  the 
trammels  and  conventions  of  the  world,  to 
make  it,  in  fact  as  well  as  in  name,  the 
supreme  joy  of  mankind.  When  we  speak 
of  the  equality  of  the  sexes  and  of  the  hos- 
tility which  envenoms  their  relations,  we 
do  not  mean  that  we  want  to  suppress 
passion  because  it  enslaves  woman ;  for 
one  thing,  we  could  not,  and  for  another, 
we  think  that  without  passion  society 
would  be  no  more  than  an  animated 
corpse. 

We  want,  notably,  to  dissociate  from 
each  other  the  passionate  idea  and  the  idea 
of  offspring ;  we  recognise  that  passion  is 
the  spirit  of  parenthood,  but  we  do  not 
want  the  two  ideas  identified.  Offspring 
should  be  natural  and  accidental,  not 
intentional.  That  children  should  be  born 
as  the  result  of  an  alliance  may  be  accepted 
as  an  implication,  but  not  as  dominating 
174 


WOMAN   AND   PASSION 

the  relations  of  the  sexes.  To  preserve 
poetry  it  must  remain  an  unobtrusive  and 
secret  process,  much  as  digestion,  to  use  an 
ugly  but  useful  metaphor  :  we  do  not,  when 
we  sit  down  to  an  agreeable  meal,  reflect  as 
we  read  the  menu  that  we  shall  assimilate 
these  foods  with  the  curious  names;  we 
have,  rather,  greedy  visions  of  cream,  and 
firm,  rosy-fleshed  fishes,  and  tender  fowls 
basted  in  savoury  fats,  and  of  mellow, 
aromatic  wines.  That  is  the  spirit  in  which 
we  want  to  approach  passion  :  we  do  not 
want  it  correct,  or  conscientious,  or  public- 
spirited,  or  eugenic  ;  we  want  it  mysterious 
and  alluring,  and  cruel  and  altruistic  and 
selfish.  Selfish,  above  all,  for  he  that  takes 
most  truly  gives. 

It  is  this  spirit,  we  hope,  will  animate  the 
new  "  new-woman,"  this  woman  dowered 
with  splendours  which  not  one  glimpses 
to-day  in  every  hundred  that  capture  the 
little  god.  It  does  not  yet,  I  confess,  in- 
spire the  new-woman,  as  I  will  call  her  in 
memory  of  her  ugly  mother  of  the  eighties, 
who  thought  that  with  the  help  of  collars, 
bloomers,  and  tobacco  she  could  make  men 
175 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

believe  that  she  was  a  man.  She  suc- 
ceeded in  making  them  believe  that  she  was 
not  a  woman,  and  that  was  a  pyrrhic  victory. 
To-day  the  new  woman  has  learned  to  look 
like  a  woman,  to  wear  djibbahs,  Liberty 
frocks,  Chinese  embroidery,  to  dress  her 
hair  soft  and  low.  Her  way  of  proclaiming 
her  emancipation  has  altered ;  she  has 
shifted  the  ground  from  the  physical  to  the 
mental,  for  she  is  acute  enough  to  realise 
the  value  of  her  sex-assets.  She  does  not 
realise  it  fully  enough;  she  condescends 
to  be  elegant  and  beautiful,  but  she  does 
not  cultivate  her  voice.  She  is  sharp,  quick, 
harsh ;  she  wishes  to  conquer,  not  to  charm. 
Because  she  is  emancipated  she  wants  to 
dominate ;  she  is  not  content  to  be  man's 
equal,  she  wants  to  crush  him ;  her  griev- 
ance has  poisoned  her  mind,  and  now  she 
must  humiliate  her  quondam  master,  con- 
tradict him  publicly  when  she  would 
politely  dissent  from  another  woman.  She 
must  flaunt  her  views  on  sex,  politics, 
philosophy  in  his  face  and  in  presence  of 
his  friends  ;  she  has  to  brag  of  her  degrees, 
of  her  membership  of  revolutionary 
176 


WOMAN   AND    PASSION 

societies,  disreputable  little  clubs  whose 
sole  merit  lies  in  their  being  obnoxious 
to  him. 

The  new-woman  is  not  a  "  nice  woman." 
It  may  be  as  well,  for  we  have  too  long 
meant  by  "  a  nice  woman  "  a  woman  whom 
a  man  might  love  as  a  charming  fool,  but 
we  do  not  see  why  she  should  not,  in 
another  sense,  become  a  nice  woman  while 
remaining  a  clever  one.  We  must  not  be 
too  censorious  when  confronted  with  this 
twentieth  century  product,  this  young 
woman  who  has  left  behind  her  Girton, 
the  Slade,  the  Fabian  Nursery,  the  Stage 
Society,  for  whom  these  old  nostrums  have 
lost  their  virtue ;  this  young  woman  has  a 
hard,  metallic  surface,  makes  nothing  of 
entering  a  public-house  if  she  is  thirsty, 
has  views  on  the  endowment  of  mother- 
hood, the  esoterics  of  dancing,  workmen's 
dwellings  and  the  segregation  of  the  unfit. 
She  is  one  vast,  incoherent,  lusty  shout. 
She  is  absurd  and  she  is  splendid ;  she  is 
frightfully  alive.  At  risk  of  offending  her  I 
must  ask  her  enemies  to  make  allowances 
for  her :  she  is  so  young  in  liberty,  so 
177 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

American  and  so  intoxicated  with  novelty. 
Again  a  metaphor  will  serve :  freshly 
painted  railings  look  very  red,  but  they 
tone  down  by  degrees.  The  new-woman 
will  tone  down.  She  is  passing  from 
tyranny  to  freedom  that  is  lawless,  and  will 
one  day  be  lawful. 

It  would  be  a  sorry  thing  if  we  had  to 
believe  that  the  new-woman  is  the  woman 
to  come.  The  male  egoist  would  regret 
the  old-woman,  and  he  must  be  taken  into 
consideration ;  he  is  not  so  black  as  he  is 
painted  by  some  Feminists,  for  he  loves 
women  in  his  protective,  muddle-headed 
way,  loves  them  more  deeply  than  many  a 
bloodless  male  Feminist  who  to-day  breaks 
lances  for  women  because  he  is  tired  of 
breaking  them  for  political  parties.  The 
male  egoist  must  be  converted,  seduced  by 
being  promised,  shown,  that  the  new- 
woman  will  be  more  charming  than  her 
mother :  otherwise  he  will  fight,  and  we 
do  not  want  to  fight  him,  to  find  him 
entrenched  in  the  polling-booth,  in  the 
courts  of  law  and,  especially,  in  the  fast- 
ness of  his  own  mind,  to  resist  the  move- 

1/0 


WOMAN    AND    PASSION 

ment  which  will  bring  him  greater  happiness 
than  he  has  ever  known.  We  do  not 
despise  him  because  he  is  an  egoist :  it  is 
a  fine  thing  to  be  an  inspired  egoist, 
capable  of  appraising  values,  of  knowing 
and  capturing  the  ideal.  We  shall  want 
naught  save  the  egoist  in  the  voluntary 
associations  that  must  come  at  the  end, 
when  we  free  ourselves  from  the  social 
organisations  still  unborn.  And  woman 
too,  so  far  as  she  can,  will  have  to  be  the 
female  egoist  who  co-operates  with  him  in 
their  joint  interest.  That  will  be  the  real 
new-woman  intellectual,  economically  free 
and  industrious. 

It  is  often  argued  by  those  who  wish  to 
maintain  woman  in  a  servile  condition  that 
her  intellectual  development  is  the  natural 
foe  of  her  charm,  in  other  words  that  "men 
don't  like  clever  women."  It  is  an  exploded 
idea.  Man  is  progressing,  not  so  fast  as 
woman,  for  he  has  less  leeway  to  make  up, 
but  he  is  certainly  becoming  more  intelligent, 
more  liberal,  more  ready  to  accord  her 
rights.  The  comparative  success  of  the 
Suffrage  Bills  is  not  entirely  due  to  the 
179 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

strenuous  advocacy  which  has  brought 
them  to  public  notice,  or  to  the  fine  temper 
of  the  militants  who  have  fought  into 
substance  that  which  was  shadow.  The 
success  comes  also  from  the  increasing 
reasonableness  of  man,  who  realises  better 
(if  not  completely)  that  woman  is  a  minor 
species  of  human  being.  He  will  not  yet 
grant  her  full  rights,  but  he  no  longer  thinks 
of  her  as  the  ornament  of  the  zenana.  He 
will  progress  further,  follow  the  line  of 
enlightenment  broken  b?  reaction  which  he 
has  followed  in  other  cases  ;  he  wijl  protest, 
give  vent  to  gloomy  prophecies,  then  yield, 
and  yield  not  entirely  to  force  but  to  the 
small  voice  of  his  reason.  And  as  he  yields, 
he  will  be  conscious  of  a  phenomenon : 
these  harsh,  combative  women,  as  they 
obtain  their  rights,  as  their  grievances  are 
removed,  will  cease  to  be  clamorous.  He 
will  discover  that  women  are  not  less 
lovable  because  they  are  intelligent,  and 
that  they  are  not  shrill  and  argumentative 
when  he  no  longer  receives  with  a  sneer 
their  most  innocent  opinions.  As  soon  as 
he  abandons  the  superior  sex-attitude  he 
180 


WOMAN   AND   PASSION 

will  have  full  play  for  the  personally  superior 
attitudes  which  we  all  enjoy  when  we  can 
justify  them. 

Intellectual  equality  does  not  destroy 
passion.  Indeed,  it  removes  from  the  rela- 
tions of  the  sexes  the  factor  of  discontent 
which  so  often  poisons  them.  I  see  no 
reason  to  think  that  because  a  woman 
understands  business  and  public  affairs  she 
cannot  be  lovable  :  one  might  as  well  con- 
tend that,  to-day,  no  man  is  lovable  unless 
he  be  a  long-haired  painter  or  a  minor  poet. 
It  is  only  when  women  are  conquering  the 
status  of  equals  that  they  are  not  lovable  ; 
remove  the  cause  for  contest  and  they  revert 
at  once  to  their  true  passionate  function, 
for  they  have  diverged  from  its  exercise 
solely  because  they  need  intellectual  equality 
to  accomplish  it  to  the  full. 

The  effects  of  woman's  economic  emanci- 
pation will  be  very  similar  to  those  in- 
volved by  the  recognition  of  her  intellectual 
equality.  Prostitution  and  the  white-slave 
traffic  must  almost  automatically  disappear, 
for  I  need  not  assure  the  informed  that 
few  women  adopt  prostitution  as  means  of 
III 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

livelihood  when  other  means  offer.  A  small 
proportion  of  lazy,  self-indulgent  and  stupid 
women  go  open-eyed  into  this  gulf,  but 
they  soon  regret  the  step;  their  tendency  to 
take  to  drink  is  an  evidence  of  wretchedness, 
the  facility  with  which  they  allow  bullies 
to  prey  upon  them,  an  evidence  of  loneli- 
ness. The  social  enquirer  has  it  confirmed 
on  every  side  that  the  prostitute  carries  her 
cross.  But  she  cannot,  under  present  con- 
ditions, emerge  from  the  abyss,  for  the 
world  has  no  reasonably  light  work  to  offer 
her  on  fair  terms :  it  is  absurd  to  think  that 
a  girl  will  readily  abandon  the  adventure 
and  occasional  gaiety  of  the  streets  for 
the  half-conventual,  half-penal  workhouse 
laundry.  The  Feminist  has  for  prostitution 
no  cure  in  the  direct  sense,  but  is  convinced 
that  the  economic  emancipation  of  woman 
will,  on  the  one  hand,  cut  off  the  supply  of 
women  for  the  trade,  and,  on  the  other, 
restrict  the  demand  by  causing  men  to 
realise  better  the  equality  and  nobility  of 
his  partner. 

When  we  have  established  woman  in  the 
world,  levelled  her  wages  with  those  of  man, 
182 


WOMAN    AND    PASSION 

conquered  minimum  wages  for  all,  raised 
the  school  age  and  created  an  educational 
system,  the  status  of  woman  in  man's  eyes 
will  have  been  so  revolutionised  that  he 
will  not  so  readily  make  of  her  a  toy ;  and 
he  will  not  find  it  easy  to  do  so.  Women 
will  no  longer  be  driven  into  the  slave 
market  as  they  are  nowadays  by  the  truck 
system  of  the  shops  where  they  "  live  in," 
by  the  seasonal  trades  which  throw  them 
out  of  employment  for  months  on  end,  and 
they  will  not  be  so  sentimental,  so  gullible. 
They  will  stand  as  economic  equals  and, 
as  such,  will  enjoy  at  least  the  respect 
which  attaches  to-day  to  women  of  in- 
dependent means.  All  this  will,  I  think, 
make  for  a  refining  of  passion.  There  will 
still  be  contest  between  the  sexes,  but  it 
will  be  a  fair  contest,  and  when  they  ally 
they  will  be  rid  of  the  monetary  element 
which  to-day  drags  a  slimy  trail  across  the 
purest  loves.  It  is  suggested  that  when  a 
married  woman  draws  a  proportion  of  her 
husband's  wages  or  income  the  man  will 
feel  degraded  and  visit  his  wrath  upon  her, 
but  I  have  still  to  learn  that  men  are 
183 


WOMAN   AND  TO-MORROW 

degraded  when  they  marry  women  who  are 
richer  than  they  are  ;  indeed,  men  are  known 
to  live  upon  their  wives'  incomes  with  perfect 
equanimity.  The  truth  is  that  when  women 
are  economically  free  a  haunting  doubt  will 
be  removed  from  the  mind  of  men  :  they 
will  cease  to  have  to  ask  themselves  whether 
they  are  loved  or  merely  accepted  as  pay- 
masters. They  will  be  sure  that  they  are 
loved,  for  woman  will  no  longer  have  for 
her  surrender  a  reason  other  than  love ;  the 
economic  emancipation  of  woman  will 
herald  in  an  era  of  romance,  for  romance 
alone  will  sway  the  world.  We  accept 
that  all  temperaments  must  have  play,  that 
some  are  essentially  celibate,  some  moderate 
and  faithful,  some  wanton.  There  should  be, 
in  a  Feminist  State,  room  for  the  nympho- 
maniac, for  the  State  has  no  business  to 
regulate  sex-relations ;  its  business  is  to 
keep  the  peace,  to  prevent  the  puritans  as 
well  as  the  licentious  from  interfering  with 
the  liberty  of  others.  It  is  interfering  with 
liberty  to  deprive  woman  of  opportunity 
and  to  drive  her  into  prostitution,  for  this 
deprives  her  of  the  right  to  choose. 
184 


WOMAN   AND   PASSION 

Starting  from  the  assumption  that  love 
should  be  free,  uncensored  and  above 
purchase,  we  must  detest  it  where  we  see 
it  venal,  bold,  grasping  and  insensitive. 
We  do  not  propose  to  establish  free-love ; 
we  propose  to  establish  freedom  in  choice, 
which  is  not  the  same  thing.  It  is  con- 
ceivable that  a  generation  better  convinced 
than  is  ours  of  the  equal  rights  of  the  sexes 
might  do  away  with  the  marriage  contract 
and  edict  that  men  and  women  should 
freely  come  together  or  separate :  this  would 
be  the  ideal  system,  but  there  are  to-day 
so  few  beings  sufficiently  responsible  and 
constant  that  free-love  is  not  for  us  worth 
discussing.  The  Feminist  State  would 
hardly  forbid  it,  for,  after  all,  the  existing 
State  does  not  forbid  it  and  allows  any 
man  to  control  an  "  abode  of  love,"  but  we 
are  not  concerned  with  the  law.  The  law 
does  not  matter  ;  it  is  custom  matters,  and 
it  will  be  so  long  before  the  mass  of  man- 
kind look  upon  free-love  as  normal  that  we 
need  not  dilate  upon  it. 

I  imagine  that  under  Feminism  there 
will  be  room  for  alliances  of  every  kind ; 
185  N 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

we  seek  a  freedom  without  limits,  and  we 
shall  attain  it  automatically  when  woman's 
economic  revolution  has  been  worked. 
Upon  the  revolution  must  follow  a  read- 
justment of  woman's  status  ;  we  do  not, 
nowadays,  express  much  surprise  when 
informed  that  a  man  has  a  second  establish- 
ment:  in  those  days  we  may  accept  as 
quite  natural  that  a  woman  has  allied  with 
a  man  on  a  George  Meredith  lease.  Those 
people  to  come  will  not  be  as  we,  small, 
covetous,  and  limited.  I  see  them  as 
shadows  upon  a  screen,  but  certain  char- 
acteristics appear.  I  imagine  a  type  of 
man  who  will  not  be  as  we  are,  sex-haunted, 
who  will  be  able  to  look  upon  a  woman 
without  insistent  desire;  he  will  take  woman 
for  granted,  as  a  politician,  artist  or  labourer, 
and  he  will  think  her  worthy  of  her  hire. 
It  will  not  occur  to  him  to  consider  whether 
she  is  his  equal :  she  will  be  his  equal,  and 
that  is  all. 

The  woman  under  Feminism  will  also  be 

regenerated.     Free  to  labour  and  free  to 

love,  she  will  no  longer  be  oppressed  by  her 

sense  of  inferiority,  for  she  will  no  longer 

1 86 


WOMAN    AND   PASSION 

be  inferior,  or  be  thought  inferior.  She 
will  not  be  jealous  of  her  fellows,  for  she 
will  be  as  well  thought  of  as  they  ;  she  will 
not  be  vain,  for  she  will  no  longer  have  to 
compete  for  the  favour  of  man  ;  she  will  no 
longer  be  narrow,  for  every  educational  and 
public  opportunity  will  be  open  to  her. 
Indeed,  as  I  look  at  my  shadow-picture,  I 
seem  to  find  her  altogether  too  simple, 
unaffected,  balanced,  to  see  her  as  ab- 
normally normal,  and  my  inheritance  of 
male  egoism  makes  me  a  little  afraid  of 
this  new  creature,  so  logical,  so  clear-eyed. 
Will  she  understand  passion  ? 

I  think  so.  It  will  not  be  the  old, 
cramped  passion,  the  passion  of  the  prisoned 
thing  which  struggles  towards  freedom.  It 
will  be  a  simple,  generous  passion,  and  it 
will  gain  in  intensity  that  which  it  loses  in 
complexity ;  it  will  be  unreserved,  there  is 
nothing  which  it  cannot  say  ;  it  will  be  un- 
ashamed, for  it  will  have  nothing  to  be 
ashamed  of  ;  it  will  not  slink  in  dark 
corners,  but  flaunt  itself.  Liberated  from 
the  shackle  of  money  it  will  be  as  some 
great  river  undammed  that  sweeps  towards 
187 


WOMAN   AND   TO-MORROW 

the  sea,  not  as  a  torrent  which,  once  past, 
leaves  behind  it  dry  pebbles.  It  will  flow 
on,  broad  and  steady,  but  gentle  like  all 
big  things,  and  carrying  its  ships. 


THE    END 


THE  ANCHOR  PRESS,  LTD.,  TIPTREE,  ESSEX 


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